Preamble

The House met at half-past Two o'clock

PRAYERS

[MADAM SPEAKER in the Chair]

Oral Answers to Questions — EMPLOYMENT

Unemployment

Mr. Mullin: To ask the Secretary of State for Employment what plans he has for reducing the number of unemployed; and if he will make a statement.

The Secretary of State for Employment (Mr. Michael Portillo): The Government will continue to control inflation and Government spending and borrowing. Those policies have reduced unemployment by 558,000 since December 1992 to a level almost 2 percentage points below the European Community average.

Mr. Mullin: Has the Secretary of State noticed that, despite all the rhetoric, the level of public spending is the same as the level that his Government inherited from the Labour Government in 1979 and that his party is now the party of high taxation? Might not that be because it is extremely expensive to maintain the best part of 3 million people who are permanently out of work? Does he now regret advocating policies which have led to mass unemployment?

Mr. Portillo: I am an advocate of policies that will lead to mass employment. Keeping inflation low and keeping control of public spending and public borrowing are the way to ensure that employment is created in this country. The hon. Gentleman has created a reputation for himself as a seeker after truth and justice, but when he speaks in the House on unemployment he is a propagandist and seeks to distort. His party is in favour of higher taxation and higher spending and, therefore, it is in favour of higher unemployment.

Sir Ralph Howell: While welcoming the fact that unemployment is falling, is that not partly due to the trend for one regular full-time job to be turned into two part-time jobs? Should we not cease to deceive ourselves that unemployment is falling in the long term when in fact it is 65 per cent. higher than it was four years ago?

Mr. Portillo: My hon. Friend should look at the figures that we published last month, which showed an increase over the past year of 221,000 full-time jobs anti only 83,000 part-time jobs. My hon. Friend is too careful a student of the figures to fall in with the propaganda put out by the Labour party, which despises part-time employment even though such employment is often the ladder to full-time employment and also the way in which many people wish to structure their working lives. Even

if my hon. Friend had fallen in with that propaganda, the most recent figures show that the number of full-time jobs is rising faster and that they are more numerous than part-time jobs.

Mr. Chidgey: Will the Minister confirm that unemployment among ethnic minority groups is running at more than three times the national average? What action is his Department taking to compile evidence of racial discrimination in employment and what measures is the Secretary of State planning to eradicate the imbalance in the unemployment figures?

Mr. Portillo: A series of questions answered recently by, I believe, my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley (Mr. Oppenheim) drew attention to worrying levels of unemployment among ethnic minorities, which is indeed a problem. My Department tries to address its policies and to approach its client group so that opportunities for those facing discrimination of any sort—including, for example, older workers and those who have been long-term unemployed—are maximised. We shall continue to tailor our measures to provide the most effective help for all sorts of people and for those facing any prejudice, to improve the working of the labour market and to help those people to improve their employability.

Mr. Merchant: Does my right hon. Friend agree that a proper understanding of the employment situation requires examination of not only the very welcome fall in unemployment, but the increase in the number of people in jobs? Will my right hon. Friend confirm that an increase in that latter figure is correct?

Mr. Portillo: Yes. For some time the Opposition used to take heart—I use that phrase because they like to look for bad news—from the fact that although the number of people employed was clearly rising, according to the labour force survey, which was the internationally agreed standard, at the same time there was a reduction for several quarters according to the other survey, the work force and employment survey. Now both measures have come into line and both surveys say that there has been an increase in the number of people in work, and also a substantial increase in the number of self-employed. Unemployment is falling, and employment and self-employment are rising, so there is no bad news left for the Opposition: the only conclusion to be drawn is that the economy is doing well under the policies pursued by the Government.

Ms Harman: Will the Secretary of State admit that there has indeed been bad news today for the 2,900 Rumbelows staff who have learnt that they are to lose their jobs? What has he to say to them? Will he recognise that there will be no feelgood factor so long as everyone at work in this country feels that his or her job is under threat? Does not the right hon. Gentleman's complacency, which he has demonstrated yet again today, simply remind everyone that the Government are out of touch and do not care?

Mr. Portillo: I have recently read some articles on the national minimum wage written by the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull, East (Mr. Prescott) which made me believe that the hon. Member for Peckham (Ms Harman) had been replaced on the Front Bench. I welcome her back to her place with great relief. However,


in all the time that she and I have had dealings I have not felt that statistics were her strong point. Today she has demonstrated again that she will grasp at any piece of bad news that she possibly can. Why did she not tell us that B and Q has today announced more than 2,300 more jobs? Why does she talk only about jobs that have been lost and not about jobs that have been created? It is because she is interested only in creating gloom and in scoring political points; she is not interested in the British economy or in the plight of the unemployed. Why does she not take the opportunity to correct the false impression that she gives and acknowledge that when jobs are lost in some companies they are created in others, and that 226,000 extra jobs have been created over the past year? That is the fact of the matter, and that is what she should be talking about.

Mr. Nigel Evans: Has my right hon. Friend had the opportunity to read this year's Barclays Business News, which states that last year a net figure of more than 24,000 new small businesses were started? Does he agree with me that—[Interruption.] If the hon. Member for Hemsworth (Mr. Enright) would listen, he might hear something worth listening to. Does my right hon. Friend agree that with more than 2.6 million small businesses in this country we need to encourage those enterprises and that the last thing that we want to do is heap non-wage costs on them, as the Labour party would do? Would that not destroy jobs?

Mr. Portillo: My hon. Friend speaks good sense, but I am afraid that he is wasting his time speaking good sense to the Labour party, which is not interested in small businesses, in enterprise culture or in creating jobs in the real world. The Labour party is interested only in propaganda and point scoring. The proof of that, as my hon. Friend says, is the fact that Labour policies for the future are to sign up to the social chapter and destroy jobs in this country, to impose costs on employers and to disregard the warning given by Mercedes-Benz this week that it would have to move jobs out of Europe because of the social chapter. The Labour party wants to move us into the social chapter so that jobs will be destroyed in Britain, too.

Several hon. Members: rose—

Madam Speaker: Order. Before we make further progress, I must tell hon. Members that I hope that we shall be able to make more progress. The first question has taken almost 10 minutes.

Several hon. Members: rose—

Madam Speaker: Order. I ask Back Benchers and Ministers to be brisk in their questions and their responses. Otherwise it is most unfair to Members whose questions are further down the Order Paper. I want to see better progress made in future.

Disability Discrimination Bill

Mr. Corbett: To ask the Secretary of State for Employment what representations he has received from (a) the Confederation of British Industry and (b) the

Employers Forum on Disability about proposals in the Disability Discrimination Bill to exclude firms with fewer than 20 employees from its anti-discrimination provisions.

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Employment (Mr. James Paice): Both organisations were among the 39 employer associations which responded, 36 of which did not oppose the exemption.

Mr. Corbett: Have not both the CBI and the Employers Forum on Disability said that it would be wrong to exempt firms with fewer than 20 employees from the measures proposed in the Disability Discrimination Bill? Those organisations include 96 out of every 100 companies and represent 37 out of every 100 people at work. Why is the Minister so far apart from employers, and even further apart from the 6.5 million people with disabilities and their carers?

Mr. Paice: We always listen to what the CBI says, although not to the exclusion of everybody else. The simple fact is that out of the 39 employer associations and organisations which responded, 36 did not oppose the exemption. That is a massive majority, and we should take note of it. It is interesting that of the employers themselves—as opposed to employer associations or organisations—again, the vast majority did not oppose the exemption, which was clearly spelt out in the consultative document.

Mr. Thurnham: Does my hon. Friend agree that at present employers with 20 or fewer employees are excluded from the legislation and that it is therefore perfectly sensible that that should continue? Does he further agree that we should build the new procedures on a sensible and practical basis rather than trying to sweep everything in together?

Mr. Paice: My hon. Friend is right. The present quota system excludes firms with fewer than 20 employees, which is why we used the same figure in the Bill now being discussed in Standing Committee. My hon. Friend also rightly emphasises that we must be concerned about the overall effects of the proposals on small businesses, which do not necessarily have the resources to be able to study, follow and implement all the minutiae of the legislation. That is why Governments of all persuasions have always given favourable encouragement to small businesses.

Rev. Martin Smyth: Does the Minister take some comfort from the fact that the CBI and the Employers Forum on Disability have taken a positive attitude to the proposed legislation which may encourage the Government to go further down the road?

Mr. Paice: We are encouraged by the fact that the vast majority of organisations which responded to the consultative document did so positively in regard to the general approach of our proposals. Obviously there was a vast range of different opinions on different aspects of a comprehensive piece of legislation, and those are currently being addressed in the Standing Committee.

Long-term Unemployment

Mrs. Jane Kennedy: To ask the Secretary of State for Employment what are the latest available figures for


unemployed men in the Liverpool travel-to-work area who have either (a) been unemployed for more than five years or (b) never been employed at all.

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Employment (Mr. Phillip Oppenheim): In October 1994, there were 5,658 men in the Liverpool travel-to-work area who had been claimant unemployed for five years or more. Information is not available on the employment history of unemployed claimants.

Mrs. Kennedy: That is an example of how figures are used in an attempt to disguise the seriousness of the problem facing Liverpool. The 1991 census return showed that 44 per cent. of men in the Liverpool district had either not worked for five years, or had not worked at all, but all we get from the Government are measures designed to disguise the fact that they massage the figures. When will the Minister bring forward measures to bring jobs to Liverpool? That is what the people whom I represent are interested in.

Mr. Oppenheim: I am interested that the hon. Lady says that the Government massage the figures. I have a press release from the TUC which calls the labour force survey on unemployment figures "fully reliable". However, the LFS unemployment total is almost exactly the same as the claimant count, which blows a hole in the Opposition's claim that the claimant count is fiddled.

Mr. John Marshall: Would my hon. Friend expect employment in Liverpool to benefit from the introduction of a national minimum wage or the adoption of a social chapter? Is it not absurd that those who complain about unemployment would introduce measures which would increase the level of unemployment?

Mr. Oppenheim: During the 1970s, unemployment in Liverpool rose faster than it has under this Government, and unemployment in the constituency of the hon. Member for Liverpool, Broadgreen (Mrs. Kennedy) has fallen by 10 per cent in the past year; long-term unemployment is less than half of its 1986 peak, while overall unemployment is more than 34 per cent. down on the 1986 peak. We now have a better record on jobs than the rest of the EC, in contrast to the situation in the 1970s when we were bottom of the EC league table on unemployment.

Jobseekers

Ms Glenda Jackson: To ask the Secretary of State for Employment when he will publish guidelines on the requirements for behaviour and presentation of individuals seeking work as described in clause 6(3)(b) of the Jobseekers Bill.

The Minister of State, Department of Employment (Miss Ann Widdecombe): We shall in due course bring forward regulations under this clause. Each case will be decided on its own merits by independent adjudication officers. The Chief Adjudication Officer, in accordance with his statutory duty, will give them advice and guidance on applying the law.

Ms Jackson: Will ex-Ministers, who the Government insist must be allowed to take jobs in companies with which they had dealings while in office, be subject to those behavioural and appearance tests? Was the chief executive of PowerGen, Mr. Wallace, subject to a critical

appraisal of his appearance before the Government handed him £1.2 million in the form of tax-free share options? Is not that squalid requirement of a mean-spirited and mean-minded little Bill yet a further example of a Government committed to preserving the privileges of the few while destroying the rights of the majority?

Miss Widdecombe: I am sure that the hon. Lady has never sought to be judged on her appearance in any profession that she has undertaken in the past. If people have jobs, at whatever level, they have clearly satisfied their potential employers in terms of appearance, ability and everything else. The hon. Lady's question is therefore wholly inappropriate.

Training

Mrs. Roche: To ask the Secretary of State for Employment if he will make a statement about training provision for young people with special needs.

Mr. Paice: The Government are committed to ensuring that training opportunities are appropriate for all young people, including those with special needs.

Mrs. Roche: Does the Minister agree that that reply is totally inadequate when one considers training schemes for young people with special needs? The Harington scheme in my constituency, for example, which has been widely praised by many, including Ministers at the Department, has to struggle year in and year out because its budget is not ring fenced by the training and enterprise council. Is it not time that its budget was ring fenced so that it did not have to rely on a surplus from the TEC? Is it not time that the fine words of his Department were matched by action?

Mr. Paice: Madam Speaker, I listened to your exhortation for short answers. Had I taken longer on the first one, I could have told the hon. Lady about everything that we are doing for young people with special needs. I could have told her about all the additional financial help available through a number of routes. The training and enterprise council may provide separate enhancement payments for those with special needs. My Department may provide extra funds, and we do so in many cases. Most important, there are special arrangements to pay for low achievement outcomes, in terms of word power and number power, for special needs trainees. I could have told the hon. Lady about the funding pilot scheme now run by the north London TEC showing that the starts and outcomes—based youth training programme includes a commitment to pay premiums for special needs trainees. A range of measures is in place. The hon. Lady is right to identify a group of trainees who need special help, and they are getting it from the Government.

Mr. Rowe: Does my hon. Friend recognise the considerable contribution of charities in that area of training? Will he look carefully at the arrangements being made between TECs and charities? In the longer term, will he consider splitting the training of those who present particular difficulties from the rest of the responsibilities of TECs, which in many cases would be better employed raising the general prosperity of their area?

Mr. Paice: We recognise the specific and important role that charities play and we have looked recently at how we can assist them in that. We considered the idea


of some sort of standardised contract and we are talking to the TEC national council about how charities can be helped in that respect. However, I am not keen on the idea of separating those with special needs as it is a cross-party belief that overall integration into mainstream training and education is, wherever possible, the best way to help those with special needs.

Mr. Barron: Will not special needs trainees, many of whom need longer periods in training to achieve a successful outcome, be seen as too great a risk—some providers already regard them as such—because the Government's payment by results scheme has forced them to cut corners? When will the Minister take the right action and ensure that those with special needs are treated properly, rather than in the charitable way that he described in answer to an earlier question?

Mr. Paice: We recognise that those with special needs must have particular attention paid to their needs. If the hon. Member for Rother Valley (Mr. Barron) had done his homework, he would have discovered that in the training for work programme, which goes national with a payment by results system on 1 April, we have specifically ring fenced the number of starts for those with special needs. We are paying substantial premiums for their achievements so that if they are unable, understandably, to get the higher levels of national vocational qualifications they will receive massive premiums for achieving lower NVQs than would be the case for mainstream trainees. Our action is right and proper. On the youth training programme for special needs trainees in the younger age group, we shall be looking at similar measures as we move that programme towards a starts and outcomes funding system at some stage in the future.

Mr. Barron: indicated dissent.

Mr. Paice: The hon. Gentleman shakes his head, but he does not know what he is talking about. The simple fact is that we do not have starts and outcomes in the YT scheme, other than in pilot programmes. As I said to the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Mrs. Roche), special arrangements operate in those pilot programmes to protect those with special needs and to provide extra premiums.

Mr. Evennett: Will my hon. Friend confirm that training for young people today, irrespective of whether they have special needs, is better than it has ever been in our history? Does he also agree that it is extremely encouraging to note the number of 16 and 17-year-olds who are in full-time education or training?

Mr. Paice: My hon. Friend properly identifies the tremendous improvement in staying-on rates. That is a tribute to all that the Government have done to improve the range of opportunities for young people. For instance, the development of general national vocational qualifications to provide an alternative vocational route for people to carry on into further education has been a major step forward and a major contributor to the improved staying-on rate. The massive expansion in higher education opportunities is also a great tribute to the Government. We have provided more opportunities for young people than any Government in history, particularly the last Labour Government.

Workers' Representation

Mr. Miller: To ask the Secretary of State for Employment when he next expects to meet representatives of the Trades Union Congress to discuss representation of workers.

Mr. Oppenheim: My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has regular contact with the TUC to discuss a range of issues.

Mr. Miller: When the Minister met representatives of my union—Manufacturing Science Finance, or MSF—just before Christmas, he gave no comfort to the workers at G.S. Scott who were dismissed following attempts to gain union recognition when the vast majority of workers in that small company wanted that recognition. Is that not yet another example of the Government attempting to protect the interests of the privileged? Does the Minister accept that in this day and age if the majority of workers want union recognition it should be given by the employer?

Mr. Oppenheim: There is a fundamental difference between the right to belong to a trade union and the right not to be discriminated against for belonging to a trade union. There is redress—[Interruption.] The union should have advised its members to go to an industrial tribunal, where they would gained some redress legally. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman should address his question to the union leader who failed to give that advice, because redress is available.
There is a difference between the right to belong to a trade union and politicians telling employers that they should deal with unions rather than dealing directly with employees, which they prefer to do. That voluntarist approach of allowing employers to make the choice does not seem to be causing any problems with the Opposition spokeswoman, as she has just sent her child to a school which has refused to recognise a trade union.

[Interruption.]

Madam Speaker: Order. Sit down. That is a total abuse of Question Time. I have asked not only for questions and answers to be brief, but that they should be to the point and deal with the substantive question on the Order Paper.

Mr. Campbell-Savours: On a point of order, Madam Speaker—

Madam Speaker: There is no point of order.

Mr. Campbell-Savours: The record should be corrected. What the Minister said is not true.

Madam Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman must resume his seat. I have dealt with the matter and reprimanded the Minister, as well as Back Benchers who take a long time to ask their questions. It is absolutely essential that Ministers should answer the questions that are on the Order Paper or are asked as supplementaries and not to try to sidestep those questions by introducing irrelevant material.

Mr. Knapman: When my hon. Friend meets the TUC, will he mention the subject of Mercedes-Benz, which may well wish to move its manufacturing plants to this country


because of the high cost of the social chapter? Given that the TUC seems to believe in the social chapter, is it perhaps left in something of a dilemma?

Mr. Oppenheim: rose—

Hon. Members: Resign.

Madam Speaker: Order.

Mr. Oppenheim: It is not only Mercedes; Sabena also wants to move workers out of Belgium because of the high levels of labour regulation. The sooner that our partners in the European Union realise that the more one adds to employers' costs, the more one will cost employees their jobs, the better the job prospects of people in Europe will be.

European Social Policy

Mrs. Ewing: To ask the Secretary of State for Employment what recent discussions he has had with his European counterparts on the European Commission's Green Paper on European social policy options for the Union; and if he will make a statement.

Mr. Portillo: The Council of Ministers discussed the Commission's White Paper on European social policy on 6 December. I argued that the Social Affairs Council should concentrate its efforts in future on a positive agenda designed to help member states in their fight against unemployment, rather than on unnecessary and potentially damaging employment legislation.

Mrs. Ewing: Given that the Government's papers change colour as often as their policy on Europe, does the Minister recognise that the veto that he used at the Council in December has left the UK very isolated in various areas of important legislation? Is it not a fallacy on his part to peddle the myth that the competitiveness of other countries is being damaged because of regulations? The reality is that the competitiveness of those countries is much greater than that of the UK.

Mr. Portillo: I am surprised that the hon. Lady chooses to make that argument in the week when the head of Mercedes-Benz has made the point that he may have to pull out of Germany precisely as a result of the high social costs that are imposed by the social chapter.
The hon. Lady is quite wrong to think that the United Kingdom is isolated. The United Kingdom is following policies that are now recognised as being in the main stream around the world. In Korea, in Japan, in the United States, in South America and in Australia, Governments are following policies directed at making their economies more competitive. Specifically, they are putting the emphasis on keeping the burden of costs on employers light. This is a world-investing, world-trading and world-conscious country, and we shall not be browbeaten into imposing costs on our employers that would make us uncompetitive in that world.

Mr. Peter Bottomley: Is not most of European social policy supposed to be built around the protection of people's health and safety at work? Is it not a paradox that we have the best health and safety record in Europe, and one that builds on a tripartite voluntary system which requires no imposition from Brussels?

Mr. Portillo: We have high levels of health and safety protection, and I am proud of them, but I cannot agree

with my hon. Friend that the social policies of the European Community are built on health and safety matters. The social chapter is an ambitious attempt to build a social dimension into Europe—that is, to impose very high costs on employers for Governments to develop social policies that they cannot afford and to impose them on employers, and to achieve that by a massive extension of qualified majority voting. Only when they have not been able to achieve that by the social chapter, because of Britain's opt-out, have they resorted to health and safety chapter headings. In at least one case, I thought it to be so wholly inappropriate that I am contesting it in the European Court.

Ms Harman: Given the concern expressed by the President of the Board of Trade about the threat to employment growth caused by the divisions in the Government over the European single currency, will the Employment Secretary tell the House whether he continues to believe what he said on GMTV last year—that he does not want a single currency and that the 1999 timetable is unrealistic? Is that still his opinion, or does he agree with the Chancellor, who said last Thursday that Britain might have a single currency by 1999?

Mr. Portillo: I can tell the hon. Lady that that was not discussed at the meeting of European Ministers which was referred to in Question 7. The Prime Minister has made it perfectly clear that, if a single currency is recommended in 1996 or 1997, the United Kingdom will not be part of it and we will not make a recommendation about it to Parliament. I believe that people around the world are concerned about Britain's membership of a single European market, and that is not in doubt.

Minimum Wage

Mr. Riddick: To ask the Secretary of State for Employment on what occasions discussions have taken place between European Employment Ministers on the effects of a minimum wage (a) on young workers and (b) on the long-term unemployed.

Mr. Oppenheim: There have been no discussions, but the EC White Paper on competitiveness criticises the minimum wage for destroying jobs.

Mr. Riddick: Is my hon. Friend aware of a report, commissioned by the French Government, which found that the minimum wage in France contributed significantly to the much higher levels of unemployment among young people and the long-term unemployed? Does he agree that the social chapter, while equally well meaning, could have the same bad effect on job prospects? Should he not encourage our European partners—all 11 of them—to stage a mass opt-out from the social chapter and thereby create more jobs across Europe?

Mr. Oppenheim: My hon. Friend is quite right. It is interesting that two European countries—France and Spain—which have a minimum wage of the type that Labour proposes for Britain have youth unemployment levels which are two and three times that of the United Kingdom.
I find it amazing that the Opposition are trumpeting the fact that they are launching a campaign on the minimum wage, yet Opposition Members cannot come to the House and tell us at what level they would introduce the


minimum wage and what they would do about differentials. I urge the relevant Opposition spokesman to tell the House exactly what Labour's policy is.

Mrs. Anne Campbell: What is the Minister prepared to do for my constituent: a 50-year-old divorced woman who is trying to find work? She is not able to take up work because the only jobs that she can find are low paid and part time and if she accepts them she is then disqualified from benefit and cannot afford to keep herself. What will the Minister do for people in those circumstances?

Mr. Oppenheim: One of the schemes that we have to help such people is the back-to-work bonus. [Interruption.] Opposition Members may deride that, but it is designed to help such people. Obviously, Opposition Members are not interested in those practical measures.
The hon. Member for Cambridge (Mrs. Campbell) also ignores the fact that the number of full-time jobs has increased significantly in the past year, in contrast to what is happening elsewhere in Europe.

Sir Michael Neubert: When considering the interests of young people and others, is it not instructive to draw on our experience of the minimum wage in the United Kingdom? Is it not the case that, in those industries which were formerly covered by wages councils, not only have average earnings been sustained and even improved but the number of people employed has increased?

Mr. Oppenheim: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. There is a further point: a single man—

Mr. Olner: No, he is not.

Mr. Oppenheim: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The figures clearly show that employees who were covered by wages councils have seen faster wage rises than has the work force as a whole. They are the facts and if the hon. Member for Nuneaton (Mr. Olner) cares to deny them, he will have to produce other facts to counter them.

Mr. McCartney: That was a contemptible and a shabby question from an hon. Gentleman who gets paid £1,000 per minute for a question.

Madam Speaker: Order. If the hon. Gentleman has a question to put to the Minister, I will hear it; otherwise I shall call another hon. Member.

Mr. McCartney: Will the Minister accept that we are the only country in Europe which does not guarantee a minimum wage? This is the only Government in Europe who give pay jackpots to the boardroom while there is low pay in the workplace. Is it not the case that, under the jobseeker's agreement, the Government will force people to take employment for £1 per hour or lose their right to benefit?

Mr. Oppenheim: The hon. Gentleman should check his facts because only half the European Community countries have statutory national minimum wages. If the jobseeker's allowance is such an evil, why does his party not pledge itself to abolish it when it is in government?
Let us not have any nonsense about the Opposition not wanting to give policy pledges, because they have just given such a pledge for a £75 back-to-work bonus. If the

JSA is such an evil, I invite the hon. Gentleman to commit himself here and now to abolish it if his party returns to power after the next election.

Mr. Ian Bruce: Will my hon. Friend confirm that the companies which are actually paying below the £4 level per hour are often those with marginal businesses such as rural sub-post offices and corner shops? Does he believe that those businesses are more likely to stay in business with a minimum wage of more than £4 a hour, or go out of business and destroy even more jobs?

Mr. Oppenheim: The figures clearly show that only four in 1,000 adult full-time workers earn less than £2.60 and that 60 per cent. earn more than £5.30 a hour. It is also interesting that a single man in the bottom 10 per cent. of earnings would have seen his take-home pay increase by more than 23 per cent. since 1979, whereas the same person would have experienced a fall of 1 per cent. between 1974 and 1979. The only time Britain was a low-paid, skivvy economy was not under the Conservative Government, but under the Labour Government.

Inward Investment

Mr. Brandreth: To ask the Secretary of State for Employment what is his assessment of the impact on inward investment of the United Kingdom's recent industrial relations record; and if he will make a statement.

Mr. Portillo: The turnround in industrial relations records since 1979 has contributed to our remarkable record in attracting inward investment, which has made the United Kingdom the number one location in Europe.

Mr. Brandreth: Is my right hon. Friend aware that the City of Chester has a remarkable record for attracting inward investment in recent years? Will he confirm that, in the year to last November, some 238,000 days were lost in this country through industrial action, compared with 1979, when 29 million days were lost in that one year? Does he see a direct correlation between those two startling facts?

Mr. Portillo: I congratulate the City of Chester on attracting inward investment and I congratulate my hon. Friend on his part in that. He has always been positive and welcoming and has looked for opportunities for his constituents. I see a direct correlation between that and our performance in industrial relations. To put it graphically, in the first month of 1979, we lost five times as many days through strikes as we lost in the whole of 1993. Those who want the bad old days of industrial relations and disorder restored by returning the Labour party to Government need their heads examined.

Mr. MacShane: The Secretary of State will be aware that inward investment and industrial relations will be discussed at the United Nations social summit next month in Copenhagen. Will he confirm that neither he nor the Prime Minister will be attending that summit, and that a flunky or a flunkette will go instead? While the majority of European, OECD and third-world countries will be sending heads of state and Ministers


of Labour, is not Britain once again snubbing the summit and sending a message of patronising indifference to the third world?

Mr. Portillo: The hon. Gentleman gets very agitated about a matter on which no decision has been taken.

Unemployment

Mr. Garnier: To ask the Secretary of State for Employment what assessment he has made of the link between falling unemployment and the structure of the United Kingdom labour market.

Mr. Paice: During the 1980s, the Government legislated to make it easier for businesses to give 'people jobs and to restrict trade union privileges. In the 1990s, unemployment is falling at an early stage of the recovery. I believe that those two facts are inextricably linked.

Mr. Garnier: Has my hon. Friend noticed that in Harborough, unemployment has fallen consistently over the past few years and is now between 25 and 30 per cent. lower than it was at the general election? Es that not a direct consequence of a deregulated and flexible labour market, the absence of the social chapter and national regulations on the minimum wage?

Mr. Paice: Unemployment in Harborough has fallen by 739 in the past year—a fall of 28 per cent. It has followed the trend that has occurred throughout the country. That is happening because the Government have deregulated the labour market. We have a higher proportion of the work force in work than any other major economy in the European Community. In the past 15 years, the Government have radically altered the face of the British industrial scene. We have restored the rights of trade union members, returned democracy to those members and ensured a much better environment for job creation.

Mr. Clelland: Is the Minister aware that the British people no longer have any faith in the Government's unemployment statistics or in statistics which compare unemployment in Britain with that in other European countries? Is it not time that we had a common standard across Europe for measuring unemployment so that statistics could be more reliable and the comparisons more valuable?

Mr. Paice: We have a standard OECD system and its standardised unemployment rates show that unemployment in the United Kingdom is lower than in Spain, Finland, Ireland, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada and Australia. Whatever statistics the hon. Gentleman wants to use, the Government's record on reducing unemployment is better than most in the rest of the world.

Mr. David Shaw: Is my hon. Friend aware that those countries that have been most successful in reducing unemployment are those which do not have a minimum wage? Is he further aware that in the United States of America, where the minimum wage has not been increased since 1990 but has been allowed to wither on the vine and is now below United Kingdom benefit levels, employment has increased by some 6 million?

Mr. Paice: I am well aware of that. I am also aware that President Clinton was elected on a platform of

increasing the minimum wage, which he has clearly failed to do. Robert Reich, his finance minister, has admitted that to raise it would dampen the recovery and the fall in unemployment that America has seen.

Oral Answers to Questions — PRIME MINISTER

Engagements

Mrs. Ewing: To ask the Prime Minister if he will list his official engagements for Tuesday 7 February.

The Prime Minister (Mr. John Major): This morning, I had meetings with ministerial colleagues and others. In addition to my duties in the House, I shall be having further meetings later today.

Mrs. Ewing: Since the Government's policy has virtually destroyed the manufacturing base of the north of Scotland—including industries such as our pulp mills, oil fabrication yards and a smelter—and, more recently, led to the mothballing of three distilleries, is the Prime Minister prepared to allow the Cabinet to sit back and watch the destruction of our tourist industry as a result of the axing of rail services, both sleeper accommodation and Motorail facilities, to the north of Scotland? Will he, as a courteous man, now instruct the Secretaries of State for Transport and for Scotland to afford the representatives from the north of Scotland a meeting—a request for which was submitted some six weeks ago—tomorrow to discuss those vital issues?

The Prime Minister: Of course I shall look carefully at what the hon. Lady has to say. We are keen to see a successful tourist industry in the north-east of Scotland and elsewhere in the United Kingdom. If the hon. Lady looks right across Scotland as well as the rest of the United Kingdom, she will see that manufacturing industry is expanding, doing extremely well, making many things that just a few years ago were simply not made in Britain, and exporting at record levels around the world. In the past year there have been eight successive new monthly records in exports alone.

Mr. William Powell: Will my right hon. Friend reaffirm the Government's support for British agriculture in order to assert that farmers are as entitled as any other of Her Majesty's subjects to earn their living under the law, and that includes selling their young veal calves at a proper market price if they so choose? Will he confirm that causing mayhem at British ports and airports is no way to stop practices in other countries that we have banned here, and that those who do so should take their cause to other countries in the Community and to the European Parliament, not pursue it here?

The Prime Minister: My hon. Friend is right to stress the importance of the farming industry and entirely right to stress the fact that farmers have a right to carry on their trade within the law, as does everyone else. I think that my hon. Friend and the House know our opposition to veal crates and of the measures taken by my right hon. Friend the Minister of Agriculture,


Fisheries and Food to try to ensure that they are taken out of commission not just in the United Kingdom but right across Europe.

Mr. Blair: Will the Prime Minister state clearly whether he agrees with the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, who has said that he would wait an eternity before joining a single currency?

The Prime Minister: I set out in detail the conditions for a single currency, originally as long ago as 1990. I reaffirmed them in some detail last Friday. I made it clear last Friday that not only must the specific Maastricht criteria be met, but that in addition we would require other criteria to be met before we thought it appropriate to consider a single currency. Some years in advance of those being met, it is unwise to say either, "Yes we will proceed," or, "No, we will never proceed."

Mr. Blair: On Friday, of course, the Prime Minister was generally facing both ways. Indeed, Conservative central office was briefing one message on Friday and Downing street another yesterday. If he will not slap down his Chief Secretary, will he say whether he agrees with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is a supporter of monetary union, and who can foresee circumstances in which Britain would join and wants to do so by the end of the century?

The Prime Minister: I have just set out in great detail precisely the circumstances in which we would find it appropriate to consider whether we should proceed to a single currency. The right hon. Gentleman has not yet indicated that for his own party at all. As to unity, we know that 50 of his Members of Parliament defied the Whip on Maastricht, 40 of his Members of Parliament defied the Whip on the European Communities (Finance) Act 1995 and the Labour party has had seven twists and turns over recent years as to whether or not it is in favour of the European Union. I repeat to the right hon. Gentleman that, as far as a single currency later this year is concerned, we would first require all the specific Maastricht criteria to be met.
In addition, we would require other criteria to be met—for example, relative flexibility of employment markets. My right hon. and learned Friend the Chancellor will set those out later this week. When those other matters are set out, we shall then consider whether it would be appropriate economically or constitutionally to proceed. I hope now that the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition, having learnt what the right answer is to that question, will fashion his own policy.

Mr. Blair: Let me put it specifically, then. If those circumstances are met, will the Prime Minister join?

The Prime Minister: I have just told the right hon. Gentleman. When and if those circumstances are met, we shall look to see whether it is appropriate and in the British interests to join. Will the right hon. Gentleman tell us now whether he would join, yes or no? Does he know whether it would be in the British

interest? No, he does not. All that he is concerned to do is to trail along the path behind the Euro-federalists, where he feels most happy.

Mr. Blair: rose—

Madam Speaker: Order. The right hon. Gentleman has had three questions. I really cannot call him again. I am sorry.

Mr. Blair: rose—

Madam Speaker: Order. I believe that the hon. Gentleman has had his third question. If he wants to reply—[Interruption.] The Prime Minister has asked him to reply. In that case, I call the Leader of the Opposition.

Mr. Blair: I think—[Interruption.]

Madam Speaker: Order. It is most unusual for Prime Ministers to ask the Opposition questions at Question Time.

Mr. Blair: I think that it is excellent that the Prime Minister is getting into the habit of asking us questions rather than answering them himself. Can I tell him this, though? Until he decides where he stands on that issue as the Prime Minister of the day, his leadership will remain weak, his Cabinet divided and Britain effectively disabled in Europe.

The Prime Minister: It is interesting to ask the right hon. Gentleman questions. It would be more interesting if he ever provided any answers.
I have set out for the right hon. Gentleman the conditions in which it would be right for us to consider the interests of the United Kingdom. I will not make a judgment that is crucial to the constitutional and economic future of this country until I see the economic circumstances of the day—and, frankly, only a dimwit would ask me to. [Interruption.]

Madam Speaker: Order. This is very time-consuming.

Mr. Streeter: Does my right hon. Friend accept that his concept of a European Union of nation states co-operating and working together for their common interests is in touch with the majority view in the country? Does it not contrast starkly with the policies of the Opposition parties, which can be described as a total sell-out to Brussels?

The Prime Minister: I think that this country has a very deep attachment to the nation state. The European Union that it seeks is a European Union based on nation states—a wider European Union, a free market European Union, a decentralised European Union, and not the federal European Union that the Opposition wish for and their Members of the European Parliament clamour for.

Mr. Ashdown: Is the Prime Minister asking us to believe that it is none of his business, and not his Government's responsibility, that school governors across the land are being forced to cut school budgets and sack teachers? Or is he saying that that is a price that our children should be prepared to pay so that he will have room for tax cuts at the next election?

The Prime Minister: As ever, the right hon. Gentleman has his facts wrong. If he looks, he will see the increased spending on teachers, support staff, books


and equipment. He will also see that the Audit Commission regularly identifies significant scope for savings by local authorities—not least Liberal Democrat-run local authorities—and their freedom to transfer more resources to education. The right hon. Gentleman may also learn that authorities are maintaining some 1 million surplus school places. Perhaps next time he asks a question, he will have ascertained some of those facts before doing so.

Mr. Waller: Does my right hon. Friend agree that the publication of new guidance relating to appointments to quangos is an extremely positive and welcome advance? Is not the constant criticism directed at members of such bodies bound in time to become a disincentive, and to prevent public-spirited persons from putting their names forward for membership?

The Prime Minister: Yes, I think that the review will prove extremely useful. It also emphasises that both the number and the real cost of non-departmental bodies have fallen significantly since 1979. As everyone who has examined the matter knows, the Opposition's criticism of such bodies is really based on their dislike of parent choice in schools, their dislike of patient choice for fundholding general practitioners and their dislike of patient choice in hospitals. That is local choice, but they call it quangos. They wish to retain choice centrally now, as they always have.

Mr. Gordon Prentice: To ask the Prime Minister if he will list his official engagements for Tuesday 7 February.

The Prime Minister: I refer the hon. Member to the answer I gave some moments ago.

Mr. Prentice: Does the Prime Minister agree with the Secretary of State for Education, who believes that a teachers' pay increase could be funded only at the expense

of between 7,000 and 10,000 teaching jobs and a spiralling increase in class sizes? How does that square with what the Chancellor of the Exchequer said at lunchtime today—that extra cash is not available and is not needed? Who speaks for the Government on this matter? More important, who speaks for the children in our schools?

The Prime Minister: We speak for the children in the schools. That is why we have given their parents choice, why we have given greater choice in schools, why we have produced performance tables, and why we have produced testing. That is why our crusade is for choice not to close city technology colleges, not to close grant-maintained schools, and not to close every element of choice that parents want and children need.

Mr. Bill Walker: Has my right hon. Friend noticed that the Scots favour the Union between Scotland and England and the rest of the United Kingdom because the Scots, with less than 9 per cent. of the UK's population, enjoy far more positions of importance—for instance, in the Cabinet, the proportion is in excess of 20 per cent., whatever the Government—in the military, in trade unions and in industry? That is what the Scots will not give up.

The Prime Minister: My hon. Friend speaks in a tone that many people will recognise. There is no doubt about the advantages, both to the UK and to Scotland, of Scotland being a full part of the UK. I do not believe that anyone who has studied the problem doubts that for a single second. The talents—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond) clearly has not studied it because he does doubt that. That is because he wants an independent Scotland disunited from the UK, in the middle of a European Union where it would have little or no influence, and that would damage the interests of Scots, the interests of Scotland and the wider interests of the UK. That is why his party must never be put in power in any way in Scotland or elsewhere.

Points of Order

Mr. Derek Enright: On a point of order, Madam Speaker. Could you help me on a way of proceeding? The hon. Member for High Peak (Mr. Hendry) uttered a calumny against a school in London, which he must have known to be untrue—that it did not recognise unions, when it does recognise unions. What redress do I have to put that right?

Madam Speaker: The hon. Gentleman must make use of the Order Paper by means of an early-day motion, or he can place a parliamentary question seeking to correct what he thinks has been a misleading statement.

Mr. Edward Garnier: Further to that point of order, Madam Speaker. Would you advise the hon. Member for Hemsworth (Mr. Enright) that my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Mr. Hendry) said no such thing?

Madam Speaker: I call the hon. Member for High Peak (Mr. Hendry).

Mr. Charles Hendry: Further to that point of order, Madam Speaker. Until this juncture, I had said nothing in the Chamber today, and it might be helpful if the hon. Member for Hemsworth (Mr. Enright) began to recognise who is who before he starts talking about hon. Members.

Madam Speaker: That is a very good point. We should all know the constituencies of hon. Members. I hope that hon. Members know my constituency.

Mr. Enright: Further to that point of order, Madam Speaker. I apologise to the hon. Member for High Peak. I did, of course, mean the hon. Member for Amber Valley (Mr. Oppenheim).

Madam Speaker: There is a world of difference between High Peak and Amber Valley.

Mr. Alex Salmond: (Banff and Buchan): On a point of order, Madam Speaker. I compliment you, as ever, on your sensitive chairing, but may I ask a question in terms of order? If the Prime Minister starts bawling at me in the middle of Prime Minister's Question Time, do I not deserve a right of reply as well?

Madam Speaker: I think that the hon. Gentleman was making gestures from a seated position and provoking the Prime Minister—

Mr. Salmond: Me?

Madam Speaker: Yes. I do not have to have eyes at the back of my head to watch what the hon. Gentleman is doing. I thought that it was rather unfair on the Prime Minister, and the hon. Gentleman got what he deserved from him.

Mr. Harry Greenway: On a point of order, Madam Speaker. Would you support me in recommending the hon. Member for Hemsworth (Mr. Enright) to stick to the classics because his geography is rather weak?

Madam Speaker: That is a very good point.

Mr. Harry Barnes: On a point of order, Madam Speaker. At this time yesterday,

the hon. Member for Ryedale (Mr. Greenway) raised a lengthy point of order about my activities in the House. He had made no attempt to inform me of what he intended to do. Had he done so, I should certainly have been in my place to hear what he said and I should have used that opportunity, with your agreement, to follow up his comments. The main thrust of his point of order was that I had somehow interfered with the Proceeds of Crime Bill, to which many hon. Members wished to speak. He implied that I had filibustered to prevent them from doing so. In fact, the debate lasted one hour 28 minutes and I was the final hon. Member to speak before the hon. Member promoting the Bill wound up the debate. I spoke for five minutes and there was ample opportunity for any hon. Member who had given his name to the Speaker to participate in the debate.

Madam Speaker: I made my views clear on that matter yesterday. I want to hear no more about it. I have given many rulings, all of them the same, to the effect that hon. Members should be informed. If any hon. Member does not understand that, he should come to my office. We have now run off pages of Hansard and collected them in a loose-leaf file that can be given to hon. Members so that they will know in future how to behave in the House.

Mrs. Helen Jackson: On a point of order, Madam Speaker. The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster is today giving evidence to the Nolan committee about publication of new guidelines for quangos. As quangos now account for £15 billion of public expenditure, I wonder whether the right hon. Gentleman has asked for time to make a statement to the House on that important issue.

Madam Speaker: No, the Minister has not done so.

Mr. Andrew Miller: On a point of order, Madam Speaker. I have given the Home Secretary brief notice of this point of order.

Madam Speaker: The hon. Gentleman did not give me notice, but I hope that this is a proper point of order.

Mr. Miller: It is a matter of urgency and I should be grateful if I could raise this point of order now. I received a fax this morning informing me that a Nigerian-owned vessel that had been moored in Ellesmere Port for more than a year is the subject of court action, the result of which is that 50 Nigerian seamen will be forced to leave the vessel on Thursday. They are very anxious because they have no means of getting home and do not know how they will be treated in this country. In view of the urgency of the matter, I wonder whether the Home Secretary could find time to gather some information and put it before the House.

Madam Speaker: That is not a point of order. Perhaps I can advise the hon. Gentleman, and any other hon. Member who might seek to raise a similar point of order, that the way to proceed is immediately to ask for an interview with the Home Secretary or one of his Ministers and in that way make representations to the Home Office. Such matters should not be raised across the Floor of the House, where they cannot be responded to by the Minister in question.

BILL PRESENTED

REGULATION OF DIET INDUSTRY

Mrs. Alice Mahon, supported by Mrs. Ann Clwyd, Ms Dawn Primarolo, Ms Jean Corston, Mr. Tony Banks, Ms Diane Abbott, Ms Liz Lynne, Ms Mildred Gordon, Mrs. Helen Jackson, Ms Harriet Harman, Ms Clare Short and Mr. Ken Livingstone, presented a Bill to regulate the diet industry; to bring all medicines relating to diets under control; and for connected purposes: And the same was read the First time; and ordered to be read a Second time upon Friday 31 March, and to be printed. [Bill 45.]

Workplace Injury Victims

Mr. Andrew Mackinlay: I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to provide that those who are in receipt of an award of compensation in respect of any accident, injury or disease as a consequence of their employment or occupation shall be entitled to benefit from such an award in its entirety; that any negligent employer or other compensator shall be obliged to meet the cost of any social security or other statutory benefit paid to any worker, employee or dependant of any worker or employee as a consequence of any accident, injury or disease resulting from the employment or occupation for which an award of compensation is subsequently made; to make legal aid available in all personal injury litigation in such circumstances, and for connected purposes.
As someone who has been a member of a trade union for nearly 30 years and who is sponsored by the Transport and General Workers Union, I am proud to introduce this Bill. One of the reasons why I joined a trade union almost 30 years ago was that I realised, along with everyone else, that none of us could be confident that we would not suffer some illness or injury as a consequence of our occupation. Every year, some 150,000 workers suffer injury or illness as a result of their occupation. Thank goodness many workers still receive the support, counsel and advice of trade unions, which will have achieved more than £300 million worth of compensation on behalf of injured workers this year.
Many workers, of course, do not belong to trade unions. As a consequence, they are especially disadvantaged. None the less, all workers, whether members of trade unions or not, find it enormously and increasingly difficult to obtain remedies for illness or injury sustained at work. One reason for that is the lack of access to legal aid to match the resources available to the employers or the insurance companies. My Bill would ensure the availability of legal aid to workers who are injured or ill so that they could challenge the vested interests of insurance companies, which do everything that they can to resist the just claims of sick and injured workers.
My Bill also takes on board the concept of the early-day motion tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Clydebank and Milngavie (Mr. Worthington), which has been signed by more than 205 members of all Opposition parties and which draws attention to the unfairness of the clawback provisions of section 22 of the Social Security Act 1989. The compensatory recovery unit currently claws back large sums of benefit from people's compensatory awards. It is demonstrably unfair, it makes nonsense of the concept of compensation and it is wholly wrong. Increasingly, hon. Members are finding that constituents are making representations to them about that unfairness, which will soon be comparable with the scale of representations that we all received about the absurd activities of the Child Support Agency. My Bill would amend section 22 of the 1989 Act and make it fairer to the taxpayer and the disadvantaged worker.
At present, the system works in favour of the selfish insurance company and the rogue employer, which are already doing everything possible to stall and frustrate fair and reasonable compensatory settlements for workers. They know that, if they stall, the likelihood of a person receiving just compensation after paying the Department of Social Security is minimal. The


system further persuades sick, disadvantaged, very ill and often traumatised people to settle for derisory compensation. Some of the people involved are terminally ill. The system is demonstrably unfair and is not in the interest of the country or taxpayers.
For the sake of sick and disadvantaged workers, many of whom are in great pain and suffering disability, and who need compensation to increase mobility, diminish their discomfort and, in some cases, to provide carers if they are very sick, we must shift the burden of the payment of social security benefits to the compensator—the employer or the employer's insurance company. That would be fair and would establish a level playing field in this unhappy state of affairs. It would mean that the employer or the insurance company would reflect that if they dragged out the proceedings and did not reach a fair and early compensatory settlement with the injured or disadvantaged worker, they could face a larger burden when the case was finally prosecuted through the courts and the worker had the support of legal aid. Not only would employers or insurance companies have to pay proper compensation, but they would repay the taxpayer for social security benefits spent in trying to maintain that sick worker and his or her family.
There would also be some very useful spin-offs from the Bill. If people were paid adequate compensation early, it stands to reason that the national health service and, indeed, the Department of Social Security, would incur less expense.
Secondly, there would be a greater incentive for insurance companies to be much more robust in demanding that employers minimise hazards at work. That might ensure that there was a proper health and safety regime in our factories, offices and laboratories, which there is not at present. There has been

considerable slippage in that respect, and it is absurd for people to suggest that we have a good record for health and safety in this country.

Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman: We have.

Mr. Mackinlay: I do not call the 150,000 illnesses and injuries caused each year in places of work a good record. That figure is a disgrace and the House should be ashamed of it. Hon. Members who support the introduction of my Bill are demonstrating their desire to diminish that unacceptable toll of illnesses and injuries suffered by workers.
It is time that the House addressed itself to the great unfairness with which workers who are sick or injured because of their occupation or their place of work are treated. I hope that my Bill will be given a fair wind and that the Government will find time for it to be discussed in Committee.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill ordered to be brought in by Mr. Andrew Mackinlay, Ms Jean Corston, Mr. Don Dixon, Mr. Bill Etherington, Mr. D.N. Campbell-Savours, Mrs. Alice Mahon, Mr. Alan Meale, Mr. Gordon McMaster, Mr. Andrew Miller, Mr. Dennis Skinner, Mr. John Spellar and Mr. Tony Worthington.

WORKPLACE INJURY VICTIMS

Mr. Andrew Mackinlay accordingly presented a Bill to provide that those who are in receipt of an award of compensation in respect of any accident, injury or disease as a consequence of their employment or occupation shall be entitled to benefit from such an award in its entirety; that any negligent employer or other compensator shall be obliged to meet the cost of any social security or other statutory benefit paid to any worker, employee or dependant of any worker or employee as a consequence of any accident, injury or disease resulting from the employment or occupation for which an award of compensation is subsequently made; to make legal aid available in all personal injury litigation in such circumstances, and for connected purposes: And the same was read the First time; and ordered to be read a Second time upon Monday 1 May, and to be printed. [Bill 46.]

Opposition Day

[4TH ALLOTTED DAY]

Financial Settlement for Schools, 1995–96

Madam Speaker: Before we begin, I have to tell the House that I must limit Back-Bench speeches to 10 minutes both in this debate and in the next, on passenger services under railway privatisation.

Mr. David Blunkett: I beg to move,
That this House believes that the 1995–96 financial settlement for schools will, in the words of the Secretary of State for Education, `cause class sizes to shoot up' and 'lead to the loss of thousands of teaching posts', with a consequential detrimental impact on standards and opportunities for young people.
In tabling the motion, it is we in the Labour party, not the Government, who speak for the pupils, parents, governors and teachers who are rightly concerned about what the Government's financial settlement for local government in the coming year will do to our schools and to our children. Those people say, as we say, that that is a cut too far—a cut that will damage education prospects, standards, achievements and opportunities for children in every part of the country.
We are backed not only by those who have traditionally fought for education but by the words of the Secretary of State herself, who clearly admitted the truth in a letter leaked to The Times Educational Supplement, in which she gave her Cabinet colleagues a clear picture of what would happen if the Government's increase in expenditure and their predictions of what local authorities should spend did not even manage to meet the sum necessary to take account of the 110,000 extra pupils who will have to be accommodated in schools in the coming year. That is the equivalent of two primary schools in every area of the country. The 1.2 per cent. increase necessary to match that growth in numbers has not been included in the Government's calculations, never mind the 2.5, 2.6 or 2.7 per cent. increase in teachers' pay that the Government will agree later this week.
It is a scandal that while the Secretary of State for Education sits on the sidelines—not sulking, I hope—the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury and even, today, the Prime Minister, treat the issue as if they were in the right and governors, parents and teachers should be abused and bemused.
Every governor and every teacher in the country knows exactly what the position is.

Mr. Jacques Arnold: Will the hon. Gentleman tell the House what he makes of a council that makes provision for an increase in pay for council bosses but none for teachers' pay or for schools—a council that, on the contrary, cuts those budgets? I refer to Kent county council, which has had a 2.1 per cent. increase in Government funding and is controlled by Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

Mr. Blunkett: The £8 million shortfall on the Government's determination of what Kent county council can spend on education—known as the standard spending assessment—is dealt with in terms of Government grants

and the capping regime, and that precludes the council from being able to spend the money even if it was able to raise it.

Mr. Arnold: That is not true.

Mr. Blunkett: Kent county council—after 20 years—has now, under an alliance between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, opened the first nursery class in two decades and is about to open another eight. It is strange that the hon. Member for Gravesham (Mr. Arnold) should raise only the issue of financing Kent. The Government are not prepared to provide the necessary spending for the pay increase for teachers, and they are not even prepared to begin to suggest where the money will come from to pay for the much-vaunted promise of the Prime Minister at the Tory party conference that four-year-olds would receive nursery education.
The truth is known by every governing body and parent in the country. The delegation now permitted to governing bodies is used effectively by authorities up and down the country—the average delegation to governing bodies is between 85 per cent. and 90 per cent.—which is why governors and parents are up in arms. It is because it is no longer a battle between the local education authorities and the Government, but a battle between parents and governing bodies and the Government. That is why those involved with schools—often from leafy suburbs—are now suggesting that their task should not be to cut the number of teachers, increase class sizes or reduce the availability of books. Their task should be to fight for standards and opportunities in education.

Mr. Bob Dunn: May I correct the hon. Gentleman on one point? Kent county council was Conservative-controlled for 104 years, not 20.
In Kent, 50 per cent. of secondary pupils and a significant number of primary school pupils are now educated at grant-maintained schools. Does the hon. Gentleman believe that there should be a reduction in education bureaucracy to match the number who are taught outside the LEA?

Mr. Blunkett: The Secretary of State pointed out to her Treasury colleagues in the leaked letter just before Christmas that the cuts that we are talking about this afternoon would apply equally to grant-maintained schools as to LEA schools—[Interruption.] That is in the letter, and it is in brackets to emphasise it. The reason the Secretary of State wished to emphasise that point was to ensure that the Chief Secretary to the Treasury was aware that the favoured schools would not escape the cut, and would be affected by an increase in class sizes and reductions in teacher numbers.
Kent's SSA—as we are dealing with Kent—is £55 down per pupil for every primary school and £203 down per pupil for every secondary school. That makes a total of £8.7 million, a figure which the hon. Member for Gravesham shouted was not true. It would appear that the hon. Member for Gravesham has something in common with the Chancellor of the Exchequer—they are both, to use politically correct language, mathematically challenged. Both are under misapprehensions about grant, SSA and the capping regime.

Several hon. Members: rose—

Mr. Blunkett: I shall give way in a moment. The Chancellor said at lunchtime that there would be no


reason for cuts if only local authorities were prepared to delegate more of their budgets. Labour-controlled Dudley council delegates the most of its budget to schools, while Tory-controlled Wandsworth delegates least. Dudley delegates 93 per cent. while Wandsworth delegates 82 per cent.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer's answer a fortnight ago—not this lunchtime—to the suggestion that the money allocated would not match the teachers' pay increase was that local authorities should consider selling off and leasing back their buildings, just as he was doing with the Treasury. If that is intelligent financial management, I am a Dutchman. And if I were a Dutchman, I would experience much better standards of education than under the present regime in this country.
Moreover, it is time that we challenged the Prime Minister. This afternoon, he said in reply to the leader of the Liberal Democrat party that there was no problem because local authorities could simply remove a million surplus places.

Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman: And 13 per cent. in Lancashire.

Mr. Blunkett: As usual, an intervention by the hon. Member for Lancaster (Dame E. Kellett-Bowman) sheds no light on the situation and shows that the didactic education that she received with chalk and talk did nothing to expand her learning and understanding.

Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Blunkett: I shall have to give way.

Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman: The hon. Gentleman may think that it is funny to have 13 per cent. surplus places in Lancashire, but school governors in my area do not think so because the money spent on those 13 per cent. surplus places should go into the schools. Does he really think that it is necessary to have one bureaucrat at county hall for every 17 teachers in the classroom in my constituency?

Mr. Blunkett: Lancashire faces cuts of £24 million in its budget. Every time a local authority attempts to reduce its surplus places, struggles to persuade its community, involves through consultation parents, governors and teachers, and puts the proposals to the Secretary of State, schools that appear to want to opt out to save themselves from rationalisation have permission to do so from the Secretary of State. Remaining schools must then pay for the unfair distribution of capital and revenue resources that flow from that decision, so children in other schools are further disadvantaged. That has happened throughout the country to the point—

Mr. Nigel Waterson: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Blunkett: I shall give way in a moment. I have already given way three times. Unlike some Conservative Members, I can count.
A little honesty from Tory Members would be welcome this afternoon. We are addressing a genuine crisis in the way in which excellent schools are facing up to their budgets, and all we get is silly heckling from Tory

Members who, instead of representing their communities, their parents and the future of their children, attempt to score inaccurate party political points.

Several hon. Members: rose—

Mr. Blunkett: Which one shall I give way to? Perhaps the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Mr. Waterson), as he may shed some light on the situation.

Mr. Waterson: Will the hon. Gentleman apply his own nostrum of honesty to the question by telling the House, when he reaches a logical point in his speech, whether a future Labour Government would spend significantly more across the board or adjust the distribution of SSAs? If so, which authorities would gain and which would lose?

Mr. Blunkett: We had it at Prime Minister's Question Time and we have it again now—the Government are now treating the Labour party as the Government and themselves as the Opposition. I have made our position unequivocally clear. If one does away with the bargaining between local education authorities and teachers, excludes governing bodies and schools from the ability to determine what happens with pay and conditions, but then accepts the report of an independent pay review body, one has an obligation to meet the proposed expenditure, unless one is prepared to stand up and say that it is the pupils in schools who must pay the price of that expenditure and the teachers who must face redundancy, instead of the Government.
The Government's dishonesty in suggesting that reductions in standards and opportunities in our schools should now take place, when only a few months ago they were boasting that they intended to improve standards and to match the needs of schools, reveals the duplicity of a Government who have run out of steam and who no longer care about what happens to those who are most vulnerable in our society.

Several hon. Members: rose—

Mr. Blunkett: I shall give way to the hon. Member for West Derbyshire (Mr. McLoughlin).

Mr. Patrick McLoughlin: The hon. Gentleman spoke about schools using their resources properly. As he lives in Sheffield, he will be aware that the neighbouring county of Derbyshire has, in the past 14 years, subsidised school meals to the tune of more than £100 million. This year it plans to subsidise school meals by £4 million. Does he regard that as a good use of education money?

Mr. Blunkett: My hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Mr. Dobson) has just cryptically said to me that the hon. Member for West Derbyshire does not look short of a meal or two. [HoN. MEMBERS: "Answer the question."] I will answer, because the shortfall faced by Derbyshire is £17 million.
We are in favour of nutritional standards and of school meals that children can afford, because we believe that a well-fed and happy child is one who will learn and respond in our classrooms.

Mr. Dennis Skinner: Will my hon. Friend give way?

Mr. McLoughlin: As the hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) has just insulted me, will he give way to me again?

Mr. Blunkett: I shall give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner), who is a representative of Derbyshire.

Mr. Skinner: We should recall that, for many years, the hon. Member for West Derbyshire (Mr. McLoughlin) and his Tory friends called upon Labour-controlled Derbyshire county council to put up the price of school meals, which were the cheapest in the country. They said that if the county council just put up the cost of those school meals, it would get more money from the Government for teachers and for kids. The truth is that in the past two or three years the cost of school meals has gone up three times, yet Derbyshire pupils get £272 per head less than those in the leafy suburbs of Surrey. That has not done them any good, has it?

Mr. Blunkett: I agree with the powerful point that my hon. Friend has made.
According to yesterday's briefing from the Prime Minister, he said that a compromise, a settlement, a gesture, would be made to find a solution. According to the Chancellor's briefing this lunchtime, no such settlement will be reached. I shall be interested to know whether the Secretary of State for Education has a solution to offer either today or on Thursday, or whether she is simply a pawn, an unwilling one, in a game of Government retrenchment. After all, the Government amendment speaks about a "tough" settlement. That game is obviously more important than investment in our children's future.
I regret that the Secretary of State, who means well and does her best, has become tragically enfeebled. The previous Secretary of State was missed by no one. After five years of utter turmoil, with contradiction following contradiction; after the creation of a national curriculum that caused confusion and chaos in every classroom; and a'ter disa7e.:ment and insults being exchanged over tests, t, Secretary of State came in with a pledge to be different. She said that she would be gentle and sweep the past under the carpet, but the previous Secretary of State at least managed to get a 1.8 per cent. increase in the SSA even though he did not believe in state education. The new Secretary of State, who is committed to state education, obtained a 1.1 per cent. increase in SSA and only a 0.5 per cent. increase in real spending power—

Mr. James Pawsey: On a point of order, Madam Speaker. Is it correct for the hon. Gentleman to refer to my right hon. Friend the former Secretary of State in the way that he has, saying that he does not believe in state education, when he sent his daughter to a state primary school?

Madam Speaker: Hon. Members should be careful in their comments across the Floor of the House. They are

themselves responsible for the remarks that they make, but I think that they ought to be responsible in what they say.

Mr. Blunkett: Let me rephrase that, Madam Speaker. The previous Secretary of State showed his commitment to state education by the way in which he tried to destroy it in everything that he did in every classroom, in the conflict that he created with the teachers and in the way in which he undermined morale and confidence. We knew that we were about to have something different, in a Secretary of State who was sent to bury education.
Fortunately, that will not happen, because we are here this afternoon to praise education, to fight for education and to refuse to allow other people to be blamed for the Government's decisions. It was, after all, the Secretary of State who, in a leaked letter to colleagues, wrote the following to explain how she was trying to dig the Government out of a hole of their own making:
All of this"—
the effort that she is making—
will be in immediate jeopardy if we now offer teachers either a provocatively low pay settlement or acceptable pay levels only at the cost of sharp increases in class sizes.
That is precisely the issue that we are debating this afternoon—whether the Government are prepared to match the review body's proposals on Thursday, which are, we understand, within the predicted inflation levels, not above them. The implementation of those proposals will ensure that teachers' morale is restored, and, for instance, the Marches school in Shropshire, whose results improved dramatically in the past few years, will not have to cut three or four teachers from its classrooms.

Mr. Nick Hawkins: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Blunkett: No, I will not.
This afternoon, we are talking about a challenge to the Secretary of State, in matching the increase in pupil numbers and in matching the need for improvement in investment, books and equipment.
The Office of Standards in Education report, published last week, showed that a third of 14-year-olds are not reaching an adequate standard in maths, English and science. More than half the secondary schools in our country do not have sufficient books in the classroom, as the chief inspector succinctly said in only one sentence of a long report.

Mr. Hawkins: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Blunkett: I shall give way one more time.

Mr. Hawkins: Does the hon. Gentleman realise that the fact that so few of our 14-year-olds reach the required educational standard is partly a result of the mad, doctrinaire socialist ideas of comprehensivisation, and the vast waste in Labour-run local education authorities such as Lancashire? That is why schools want to opt out, to ensure that better resources are targeted directly to pupils, not wasted by Labour-run local education authorities.

Mr. Blunkett: The hon. Gentleman shows staggering effrontery. Instead of defending his community's parents against the £24 million cuts that are threatened, he starts abusing and lashing out at everyone around him. What


sort of a party have Conservative Members degenerated into when, instead of defending their schools and their pupils, they simply seek someone else to get tough on?
What about standards and achievement? What about the £20 million cut that the Government are imposing on education support and training, £9 million of which comes out of the appraisal budget, which has done so much to lift the standard of professional work undertaken by teachers? What about the £13 million cut from the inspectorate budget? What about the removal of £14 million from the crucial reading recovery scheme, which is vital to ensure that primary schoolchildren have a real start in life? We face all those funding cuts before the Government have to find the money to move on nursery education.

Mr. James Clappison: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Blunkett: No, I will not give way any more. I will continue my speech so that other hon. Members have the chance to speak in the debate.
The Government have illustrated time and again that they believe in rationing excellence and rationing opportunity. That rationing exercise will continue in the way in which funding cuts are implemented and in the way in which they impinge on schools across the country. Excellence for a few and mediocrity for many is not acceptable to Opposition Members.
From Shropshire to Lancashire, from Sheffield to Somerset and from Cornwall to Oxfordshire, people are struggling to defend their services. There are proposals for voluntary income tax contributions and some schools are talking about a three-day week. The last time there was a three-day week was not in the winter of discontent, as was wrongly suggested in the build-up to the previous election, but under the 1973–74 Tory Government when the lights went out and people were told to clean their teeth in the dark. This time perhaps teachers and pupils will be told to work in the dark, to switch off the heating or to bring their own chalk.
The Government's disgraceful amendment has the cheek to congratulate governors and teachers
for meeting the challenge of education reform".
It is right to give credit to teachers, governors and parents. The spokesman for the Conservative party in Shropshire, speaking at lunchtime today, said that it was an insult to suggest that local authority representatives, members of governing bodies and teachers should take the blame for what was, in his words,
the responsibility of the Government of the day in terms of funding and support for the service".
We must let our children learn. Our school governors should be concerned about meeting education standards, not struggling with cutting services and undermining their schools. How can children learn if schools are falling into disrepair? Only one fifth of the amount requested for capital investment this year will be granted to schools across the country.
How can the nation face the economic and social challenges of the 21st century with a penny-pinching, underfunding and sanctimonious bunch of ne'er-do-wells running the country? Government Members know all about practising what they preach because so often they preach greed, selfishness and exclusion and then they

practise it with their families and friends. It is also evident in what goes on in privatised industry and in quangos up and down the country.
Everyone in Britain is worse off under the Tories. Everyone in Britain is expected to pay more for less in Tory Britain. We offer something very different: we offer hope for the future, investment in children's education and optimism about our country's future success. That is why we are giving our backing to parents, governors and teachers in their fight to save their schools in Britain today.

The Secretary of State for Education (Mrs. Gillian Shephard): I beg to move, To leave out from "House" to the end of the Question and to add instead thereof:
welcomes the substantial increase in the real level of education spending since 1979; applauds Government policies to raise standards in schools; acknowledges that this year's settlement is necessarily tough but congratulates teachers and governing bodies for meeting the challenge of education reform; and recognises that parents will judge schools above all by the performance of pupils and the quality of teaching and learning.".
I welcome the opportunity to debate these issues. Conservative Members understand that spending by local authorities—which accounts for a quarter of all Government spending—cannot be immune from tough decisions and economic reality. Public borrowing will have to come down if we are to keep a tight rein on inflation and increase prosperity and jobs. It is a tough local government settlement this year. That is my view and I have made it quite clear. The hon. Gentleman has made quite a lot of a leaked letter. I do not intend to comment on it, save to say that it is of a certain age and that the settlement that we finally reached provides for funding for local authority education to rise by 1.1 per cent. That is, of course, on top of a 2.4 per cent. increase for 1994–95.

Mrs. Anne Campbell: Does the Secretary of State agree that the teachers' pay award will be provocatively low, or has she changed her mind since that letter was leaked?

Mrs. Shephard: On the pay award, I shall not anticipate the statement that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister will make in due course on the reports of the review bodies.
The 1.1 per cent. increase masks a substantial rise in some authorities, reflecting their different needs. For example, in inner London boroughs there have been increases as high as 7.5 per cent., in Trafford there are increases of 4.4 per cent. and in Bury there are increases of 3.3 per cent.
As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the Environment said during the debate on the revenue support grant, there are always questions about methodology. He said that he would look at areas of particular concern when considering with local authorities whether improvements could be made next year.

Mr. Roy Hattersley: As the Secretary of State will not anticipate the Prime Minister's statement on the public sector pay award, why


will she not anticipate in the House of Commons what the Chancellor of the Exchequer anticipated on "The World at One" today?

Mrs. Shephard: I did not have the privilege of hearing my right hon. and learned Friend on "The World at One" today. I rather wish that I had, because there have been a number of conflicting reports as to what he might or might not have said.
The Government share the view that it is a tough settlement, but, of course, it should be set in the context of last year's 2.4 per cent. increase in spending and also the following facts. The hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends should take account of the fact that spending per pupil has gone up in real terms by almost 50 per cent. since 1979.

Mr. Ronnie Campbell: Can the Minister explain to a constituent who wrote to me why £211 less is spent on children in Northumberland than on children in other counties such as Oxfordshire?

Mrs. Shephard: I shall address in general terms the hon. Gentleman's comments as I proceed. The following facts cannot be ignored by the hon. Gentleman, his constituents and everyone else.
Since 1979, real spending per pupil has gone up by 50 per cent. Spending on equipment and books has gone up by 55 per cent., on repairs and maintenance by 15 per cent. and on support staff by 135 per cent.
The hon. Member for Brightside mentioned the Ofsted report. It is rather interesting, certainly to Conservative Members, that the Labour party voted against the establishment of Ofsted and, therefore, all means of measuring pupils' achievements, standards and attainment, but they are happy enough to quote from the Ofsted report now.
The hon. Gentleman was quoted last week as saying that the recent HMCI report was
about as unbiased as you can get",
so what does the chief inspector say about resources?
In overall terms the provision of resources is satisfactory".

Mr. Dunn: My right hon. Friend will have noticed that the hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) signally failed to answer my question about the need to slim down bureaucracy in the light of more children moving into the grant-maintained sector. That is certainly true of the county of Kent, where spending is out of control. In March last year, the local authority spent £35,000 on a conference at a luxury hotel for head teachers and the only Labour chairman of the Kent county council spent £1,200 of taxpayers' money on takeaway curries from shops in Dartford.

Mrs. Shephard: That would be amusing were it not so shocking. It reminds one of the equally shameful example in Staffordshire where one understands that hard-earned resources have been spent on sending members of a school's staff on relaxing weekends at a health farm.

Ms Joan Walley: Does not the Secretary of State realise that it is her policies that are causing stress to so many teachers in the classroom? How can she justify so many schools not having sufficient books, the reduction in teacher numbers when schools have already lost so many teachers and the way in which

school swimming, which is now part of the national curriculum, will not be properly funded as a result of her cuts?

Mrs. Shephard: I have no doubt that people in Staffordshire, parents and governors, will note that the hon. Lady is in favour of jacuzzi education.
The hon. Member for Brightside claims that, as a result of the local government settlement, local education authorities will have to cut their budgets. In fact, under the provisional capping regime, all local authorities will be able to increase their cash spending in order to spend more next year than they are spending this year. What they may not be able to do is to meet all their spending aspirations. Many of the stories circulating about budget cuts are the result of authorities complaining that they will not be able to expand their services in quite the way that they had envisaged.

Mr. Blunkett: If the ability to spend is increased by 1.1 per cent. and the rate of inflation, coupled with the teachers' pay increase, is more than 2.5 per cent., how on earth can there be a capacity to spend more? In real terms everyone can see that they will have to spend less.

Mrs. Shephard: I am glad that the hon. Gentleman asked that question because it coincides exactly with the answer at this point in my speech.
Local education authorities face tough decisions, but they are in the best position to decide their priorities and what they can afford. They can cut their costs because they are still spending millions on running their central bureaucracies and on maintaining surplus places in schools. Last year, the Audit Commission found scope for saving £500 million on the pay bill for local authorities' administrative and clerical staff.
Some authorities are also wasting huge sums on retaining surplus school places. The cost is calculated by the Audit Commission to be at least £250 million a year. I know that it is not always practicable to remove such surplus places—for example, in some rural areas and in areas of population growth—but there is scope to remove some of them, as Warwickshire is trying to demonstrate.

Mr. Keith Mans: Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is wrong if, as is the case in Lancashire and other counties, the Government have increased cash resources by 1.4 per cent., for the same counties to cut the delegated budgets to schools by 5.5 per cent? Is not that specifically because they are not making the savings in their overheads at county hall that they should be?

Mrs. Shephard: Lancashire seems to be a good example of that kind of practice. I am amazed that our most recent figures demonstrate that unspent school balances in Lancashire amount to £33 million. Lancashire is an important example of how local authorities can exploit opportunities to have more to spend on teachers in the classroom.

Mr. Mike O'Brien: If the Secretary of State is citing Warwickshire as an authority whose education budget has benefited from the removal of surplus places, she must also explain why the vagaries of the capping limit and the financial settlement have produced a situation in Warwickshire where, despite removing those surplus places, 200 teachers now face the sack and massive cuts will have to be made in the


education budget. Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democratic councillors have united in condemning that financial settlement.

Mrs. Shephard: I am sure that the hon. Gentleman knows that the detailed plans for reorganisation in Warwickshire are not yet agreed, but it is, of course, worth noting that it has had just above the average increase in its standard spending assessment.

Ms Estelle Morris: Will the Secretary of State give way?

Mrs. Shephard: I will give way, but I am conscious of the time and will soon have to make progress with my speech.

Ms Morris: I am grateful to the Secretary of State. She will be aware that many local authorities have seen an increase in class size to cope with the cuts. Her colleague, the Minister of State, has said repeatedly in the House that he sees no connection between an increase in class size and pupil performance. Does she share his view, or does she share the fears of many parents whose children are now in classes of more than 30 or 40?

Mrs. Shephard: I shall repeat the words that are likely to have been uttered by my hon. Friend. No research exists in this country to show that marginal increases in class sizes harm standards.
I shall deal now with some of the points made by the hon. Member for Brightside. He has not made it clear how much more he and his party intend to spend on education spending in general, how and from where he might get the money, and which of the Labour party's well-known routes he would follow—whether he would tax, borrow or print money. One thing is for certain—the money will come from the taxpayer, who will pay for Labour's usual mix of inefficiency and ideology, not for better education.
The hon. Gentleman has talked a great deal about the threat to teachers' jobs posed by the settlement. We hear those predictions from Labour Members and from Labour councillors year after year. But the truth is that the number of teachers has remained stable at about 390,000 for the past four years, and teacher vacancies are lower than they have ever been. As pupil numbers increase—as they have done over the past few years—it is possible to tighten some staffing ratios, without threatening standards, as the recent improved exam results show. One must put that teacher staffing ratio in the context of a marked increase in spending on non-teaching staff in schools, thereby releasing teachers for their real work of teaching.

Sir Peter Emery: Will my right hon. Friend condemn absolutely the scare story that is being put out by certain Liberal Democrat councils, particularly in Devon, that the Government have cut the grant to local authorities? In fact, in Devon it has gone up by 2.2 per cent? Those councils then go on to say that they are likely to lose 300 teachers. That is putting fear into parents in Devon, which is quite wrong and must be condemned.

Mrs. Shephard: Those are indeed extraordinary assertions from a county which, as my right hon. Friend said, has had twice the average increase; and which, we

understand, has unspent school balances of more than £10 million, has reserves of £51 million and has increased administrative staff numbers over the past year by 718.

Mr. Harold Elletson: Will my right hon. Friend give way?

Mrs. Shephard: I will give way to my hon. Friend, but then I must make progress.

Mr. Elletson: Is my right hon. Friend also aware of the scaremongering of Lancashire county council, which is talking about having to make hundreds of teachers redundant? Will she deal with the point that was made by my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster (Dame E. Kellett-Bowman), but which was so blithely and arrogantly ignored by the hon. Member for Brightside? Is it not a disgrace that the county council should be threatening to do that at a time when there is a ratio of one bureaucrat in county hall to every 17 teachers? A further point that Lancashire county council refused to take account of is that there are hundreds of surplus places in secondary schools throughout the county.

Mrs. Shephard: My hon. Friend makes a very good point. As I said earlier, a county with unspent school balances of £33 million seems to be making a lot of fuss.
The number of non-manual staff employed by councils increased by 90,000 between 1987 and 1993. The Audit Commission found that less than half that increase resulted from central Government initiatives. So there is room for manouevre—and it is worth reminding ourselves that LEAs have yet to set their own budgets.
Of course, the number of teachers actually employed depends not just on the pay settlement and what LEAs decide, but on how governors deploy the budgets delegated to them. I hope that the hon. Member for Brightside noted carefully what the chief inspector said in his report about the level of balances in schools. He said:
A quarter of the primary schools inspected carried forward more than 10 per cent. of their budget. Around one-sixth of secondary schools carried forward over £200 per pupil.
He went on to note:
Such deficiencies underline the need to strengthen financial management…Some schools had clear reasons for their surpluses…others‖exhibited undue caution in retaining substantial sums for no considered purpose.

Mr. Blunkett: Will the Secretary of State give way?

Mrs. Shephard: I will, but then I really must move on.

Mr. Blunkett: I shall be brief. Can the Secretary of State confirm that the six schools with the largest balances in Britain are grant-maintained schools with balances of more than £500,000 each?

Mrs. Shephard: What the chief inspector says applies to any school, whether LEA or grant-maintained. It is obvious that schools must manage their resources carefully and to the benefit of their pupils. Our latest estimate is that nationally schools held about £700 million in balances at the end of 1993–94. The clear message of that is that there is scope for substantial efficiency savings.
What we have heard today is the usual tired old story. The Opposition's approach is, and always will be, concerned with input rather than output; with money going in, not results coming out; with excuses for


deficiencies rather than efforts for achievements. Perhaps I should congratulate the hon. Member for Brightside on the service that he has performed this afternoon: he has revealed the truth. Despite the carefully crafted images of the new Labour party, despite the carefully cultivated middle class-friendly, "trust me" approach of the right hon. Member for Sedgefield (Mr. Blair), and despite the phrases so cleverly constructed somewhere in the smartest part of north London, the hon. Member for Brightside has blown the lot. He has confirmed—as, no doubt, his hon. Friends will do again during the debate—that the Labour party is still the same old Labour party: the party that always costs you more and, as the hon. Gentleman has confirmed this afternoon, the party that intends to go on costing you more, but with no idea of where the money will come from, except that it must come from the taxpayer.
I read with interest what the hon. Gentleman said last week. Here we have the authentic voice: he will have to be reported to high command. He said:
I believe we must see three key roads to success within the education system: raising standards, increasing achievement and providing opportunities.
Those are, of course, admirable aims. It so happens that they are precisely the education policies of the present Government, pursued in the teeth of objection from the Opposition parties.

Ms Jean Corston: Will the Secretary of State give way?

Mrs. Shephard: No. I have said that I cannot give way any more, in the interests of those who wish to speak later.
If the hon. Member for Brightside and his party now support the raising of standards, why did they say that tests for children were educationally unsound? How could they vote against testing in the Education Reform Act 1988? If they agree with increasing achievement, why did they say that performance tables were an unacceptable management tool in the assessment of school performance? Why did they vote against the publication of such information in 1980?
If the hon. Gentleman and his party now support the provision of opportunity, why, when we introduced grant-maintained schools and city technology colleges, did they say that they would abolish grant-maintained status and force CTCs back under LEA control? Why did they then vote against choice and diversity in education, as provided for in the Education Reform Act? Of course, we cannot be sure about anything that Labour thinks, because some Labour Members have done a U-turn and other.; ha-:e not. The right hon. Member for Sedgefield reminded us frequently that GM schools are state schools, and that parents have the right to choose schools. Other Opposition Members share his views and demonstrate that by their use of GM schools, but the hon. Member for Brightside opposes GM schools. He said:
We are against inequity wherever it exists, and that is why we oppose grant-maintained status."—[Official Report, 21 November 1994; Vol. 250, c. 430.]
In December, he assured his fellow Labour Members that Labour had no intention of continuing GM status, so who speaks for Labour? I accept, of course, that we should be wary of anything that the hon. Gentleman says about new Labour education policies, because the last one that he announced was axed within two hours of him making it by the Labour high command.
The real issue for quality education is outputs. Our reforms in providing a framework for accountability, and our spending decisions in the past 15 years represent a substantial commitment to raising standards in our schools. The facts speak for themselves. More than 43 per cent. of 15-year-olds achieved five or more GCSEs at grade C or higher in 1994, compared with 33 per cent. in 1989; one in three young people are entering higher education, compared with one in eight in 1979; a record 73 per cent. of 16-year-olds are following full-time education, up from 42 per cent. in 1979–1980.

Mrs. Bridget Prentice: rose—

Mrs. Shephard: I am sorry, but I must finish my speech now.
Those achievements are a marvellous tribute to our schools, to their teachers and their governing bodies, and to our further and higher education institutions.
If we consider the international picture, we have a record to be proud of. We spend a higher percentage of gross domestic product on public education than Germany or Japan, and we have the highest graduation rate in the European Union. It is on those achievements that schools and colleges will be judged.
The Opposition have a simple policy development system. When the Government announce a new policy, they oppose it. When that policy proves popular, they claim it as their own, and then they promise to double, treble or quadruple the amount that the Government are spending on it. It is quite simple: all one needs is the gall to do it.
Our record speaks for itself. While the Opposition have been dithering, the Government have been doing. While they have been demanding and denigrating, we have been delivering. The threat to education is real. It comes from the Opposition Benches. We shall continue to deliver and to raise standards for all our children.

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael Morris): I remind all hon. Members who hope to take part in the debate that speeches are now restricted to 10 minutes, with the exception of that by the spokesman for the Liberal Democrat party.

Mr. Roy Hattersley: I propose to deal exclusively with the small part of the speech of the Secretary of State for Education which dealt with the question under debate: this year's payment round to local authorities and, specifically, its effect on education.
The Secretary of State said loftily that she did not propose to deal with the subject of the letter that she sent to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. I understand why that is, but some of us do not feel the same restraint as it does not put us in the position in which it puts the Secretary of State. That leaked letter leaves her with two alternatives: to explain why she has undergone such a massive conversion in the past six weeks, or to admit that she intends to administer a policy that six weeks ago she said would be disastrous for the education service. Perhaps the Minister replying to the debate will tell us which of those alternatives the Government intend to choose.
The memorandum said that the proposal by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster to increase the standard spending assessment by 0.3 per cent. at a time when school rolls were increasing by 1.5 per cent. would produce a real reduction in expenditure of 1.2 per cent. per pupil. Let us operate exactly the same methodology and statistical technique with the present figures. They show that, when school rolls are increasing by 1.5 per cent., a 1.1 per cent. increase in the SSA produces a real reduction in expenditure per pupil of somewhere between 0.3 and 0.4 per cent.—a view confirmed by the Secretary of State's statisticians this morning. That is the basic figure of the present equation as demonstrated by her memorandum. That is also before we take into account the increase that schools are bound to face because of the increase in teachers' pay.
Let me tell the Secretary of State what the Chancellor of the Exchequer said at about 1 pm today. Incidentally, the Government would work a great deal more effectively if members of the Cabinet talked to each other from time to time. At 1.10 pm today, the Chancellor said that there would not be another penny to help pay for teachers' salaries. I will now remind the Secretary of State what she said to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster about that situation six weeks ago. She said that the cost of the teachers' pay settlement, assuming that it was something like 2.7 per cent. or 2.9 per cent., would be £90 million.
The Secretary of State asked my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) where the money was to come from, but she might tell us where the £90 million that she demanded six weeks ago was to come from. She said that if the £90 million was not available, the equivalent of 70,000 or 100,000 teachers would have to be sacrificed. The money is not forthcoming, and the only possible alternative for local education authorities and individual governors is to do what the Secretary of State warned the Chancellor of the Duchy would have to be done and reduce the number of teachers in our schools. We do not have to argue about that because that was the Secretary of State's opinion six weeks ago. I want her or her junior Minister to get up and tell us whether she still believes that that will be the disaster set out in her memorandum, or whether there has been an extraordinary change of heart.
I would describe the Secretary of State as the convert of the year, had not the hon. Member for Rugby and Kenilworth (Mr. Pawsey) appeared on television yesterday evening with a great revelation that he wanted to make to the world—that local democracy meant that local authorities ought to be able to raise local taxes according to the demands of their constituents. I welcome his conversion to the policy that the Labour party has advocated for the past 15 years.

Mr. Jacques Arnold: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Hattersley: No, certainly not when I have only 10 minutes.
I welcome the conversion of the hon. Member for Rugby and Kenilworth, but he is not so significant a figure as the Secretary of State—to whom I would, of course, give way immediately even though I have only 10 minutes. Does she stand by what she said in her

memorandum about the reduction in the number of teachers and the need for a further £90 million, or has she adopted another view? I suspect that she will say that it does not matter now and that the memorandum was merely a mistake, because at the north of England education conference she offered the extraordinary view that class numbers were not relevant to performance and results. The Minister of State nods. I hope that he will try to convince the independent schools, the city technology colleges and the grant-maintained schools of that point, as those that I know best use as their great pitch to get extra pupils and persuade parents to spend money the fact that they can offer smaller class sizes than the state system.
Is the Minister of State really telling us that a group of 15 pupils preparing for university entrance will do no better than a group of 30 or 35? At the other end of the spectrum, is he saying to schools in my constituency—where many children are learning English as a second language, and where there are many statemented children who need special attention, whether with general learning, numeracy or literacy—that pupils will make the same progress in a class of 35 as they would in a class of 20? If the Minister believes that, he is not fit to hold the office that he currently holds. Every educationist in the country knows that class sizes are crucial to performance. The Secretary of State chooses to say the opposite simply because she is imposing increased class sizes this year.
The Secretary of State is also doing something else. She said in her memorandum that to pick out teachers for special treatment, when everyone from the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry upward—or downward, depending on how one looks at it—says that people's wages should be determined by their efforts, at a time when teachers are beginning to co-operate in many of the reforms and proposals that she and her predecessors have introduced, is a wilful misunderstanding of the situation. She is now "provoking" teachers—her own word in the memorandum—when, above all else, schools need a little quiet, a little sensible progress and a little understanding. According to her own words, by picking out teachers she is anticipating and causing undoubted chaos.
I hope that the Secretary of State will not even consider taking my word for it; she must take the word of those running our schools—the governors. I was a Member of Parliament when, two or three Secretaries of State for Education ago—they come and go so quickly and with so little distinction that it is impossible to be sure how many ago it was—a new system of local management was introduced. I am strongly in favour of local management and I like the idea of governors being appointed not because of their political persuasion but because they have an objective interest in the welfare of our schools. They are committed to the schools' progress.

Mr. Dunn: Where has the right hon. Gentleman been for the past 20 years?

Mr. Hattersley: I have been making sure that my entry in the House of Commons guide was always accurate.
Governors were appointed to bring their objective views to bear on the schools' future. What do they say? They say that the Government are risking chaos and risking the reduction in class sizes. It is not the biased and prejudiced Liberal and Labour education authorities saying that, but the school governors who were appointed to be objective according to the Government's own proposals.
What did the Department for Education say this morning when it was asked what it would do if the governors rebelled? It said that the government of schools would have to go back to the politically biased education authorities of which we have heard so much criticism in the past five years.
The Secretary of State is going to preside over chaos in our schools. She is going to increase class sizes and do away with the good will that has been created with some difficulty with the teachers' unions. She will also do one other thing that I regard as especially unforgivable: she will squeeze education budgets in such a way that the schools that need most get least and the schools that need least get most.
The Secretary of State spoke of surpluses, but her memorandum to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster contained no such talk; nor was there any talk of bureaucratic waste or how to solve the problem without extra money. She speaks today about surpluses, but she knows—or needs to be reminded—that grant-maintained schools, partly because of the corrupt way in which they have been financed, have surpluses in their accounts which are on average 60 per cent. higher than those of state-maintained schools. Once more, grant-maintained schools will come out of this financially better than the generality of schools. That is the corruption of a divided education system. One of the reasons why we confirm—and I certainly confirm—that we shall continue our fight against that divided education system is that when the squeeze comes, it is always the schools that need most which get the least. That is what the right hon. Lady is prophesying and what she is making certain today.

Dame Angela Rumbold: I share my colleagues' pleasure in participating in this debate, but I must say at the outset how disagreeable it is that we should be witnessing such blatant politicking by the Opposition, which serves no purpose other than to worry and upset teachers and parents to the detriment of the education provided for our children. Politicking at the expense of our children is the worst form of politicking.
It was interesting to hear the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook (Mr. Hattersley) mention the £90 million which may or may not have to be produced to subvent an extra payment for teachers. In debates such as this, when we are talking about a specific subject, it is always easy to forget that every bit of expenditure has to be viewed in the context of the Government's entire expenditure. We can say that every sum of money for any particular service is most important, but the debate must take place in the context of the total amount of money available for public expenditure. I shall say a little more about that later.
Like most people—certainly like most hon. Members—I believe that education is a very high priority. I was proud to be part of the very reforms which I believe have been the basis on which the Conservative party has been able noticeably to improve the education of our children, from the earliest age through to the increasing numbers going into higher and further education, which has been a great achievement. I remind Opposition Members that the national curriculum, testing, and local management of schools did not exist before 1979. They came into being as a result of the hard work and endeavour of the Conservative party in Government. They were forced

through—I was part of the process that introduced every one of those reforms—despite much resistance from Opposition Members. Despite that, it has been interesting to see and hear Opposition Members change and claim that those reforms were their idea in the first place.
I am an unashamedly strong supporter of the Government's current economic policies. It is essential that we support and sustain the current efforts to ensure that the economy is on a sound footing. Part of that policy must be restraint, reduction and maintenance—within a straitjacket—of public expenditure, which has to be set against the whole business of encouraging growth and wealth production. If we are to survive in a competitive world, which will become increasingly competitive, we should be concerned about the battle against inflation and the battle against punitive public expenditure for many years to come. Any party in responsible Government will have to consider that.
No one knows better than I the cost of teachers to local authorities. Having lived through 10 years of local government, I know perfectly well precisely how much the cost of a 1 per cent. increase in teachers' pay means to a local authority budget. I do not speak in ignorance: I realise that teachers' pay is a very high expenditure item. Few people would disagree that teachers are a very high priority and should be a high priority in local government expenditure. I have always thought it more important to protect teacher numbers than to protect some of the other items on which my local authority, from time to time, has placed priority. Indeed, I argued that case against all other expenditure to try to protect what I thought was most important. I know that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has been in precisely the same position and has done precisely as I have.
Local authorities have a special duty to address expenditure at every level and to protect sharp end services such as education and community care. It is all too easy for them to say that they will attack the sharp end services so that they can protect all the other services that they think are more important. I will cite the example of the borough in which my constituency lies—the London borough of Merton—and explain why I think that this debate is being orchestrated nationally simply to upset and to scare parents and governors in the hope that they will make unwise decisions from which the Opposition parties may make political capital.
Merton council has been Labour controlled for the past five years. When Labour came to power, it was in receipt of quite considerable reserves. Like every new administration, however, it had its particular priorities and desires to make changes and to introduce new ideas. Also, of course, central administration was increased quite dramatically. As the central administration expanded, so did the amount of money that the local authority needed to finance it on a revenue basis. Then, of course, came changes, new priorities and battles in different services; some people were made redundant, which is an expensive exercise, as anyone in local government who has ever tried to make people redundant will understand.
In the London borough of Merton over the past five years we have experienced an inability to look carefully at capital and revenue expenditure and to plan for more than one year at a time which has resulted in stop-go policies and financing that would happen nationally were such a disaster as a Labour Government ever to occur. The recently Labour-controlled council of the London


borough of Merton, which has turned an authority with substantial balances into one with a current £12 million deficit, is a clear example of precisely what can happen through bad management, lack of planning and a total misunderstanding of the way in which revenue capital must be managed.
Faced with proposals for a tough standard spending assessment settlement this year, the borough has produced the usual knee-jerk reaction: it says that it will cut each school's budget by 7.5 per cent. and that youth services and music provision will have to be cut by 50 per cent. Youth provision has been carefully managed in my local authority. Being an inner and an outer borough, we experience some of the same problems as inner London boroughs. Youth services are therefore one of the more important provisions. To reduce provision by 50 per cent. and then to rant and rave at the Conservative party about law and order seems to be facing both ways at the same time with remarkable efficiency. I am not surprised that there was a near riot of young people and youth workers outside the town hall last night over the outrageous and disgraceful way in which they believed that the budget had been managed.
All that is despite the 2.4 per cent. increase in the provisional standard spending assessment for education in the coming year, which represents—proportionately—a larger share of the national funding for education. Even with rising teachers' pay, it must be possible in the context of overall expenditure to reduce the number of so-called indicator projects, security commissions, equality officers and so forth, to name but a few pet projects that my Labour-controlled council has implemented, and thus to address the serious problem of how to retain essential services such as education and, most importantly, to avoid making any of its teachers redundant or cutting youth services.
I doubt whether the London borough of Merton is all that different from many Liberal Democrat and Labour-controlled councils across the country. It saddens me to say this, but the distressing truth is that councils are conducting a cynical exercise in exploitation of the Government's financial policies at the expense of their own ability to manage cost-effectively and in the interests of their absurd, absolutely ridiculous, love affair with gesture politics.

Mr. Don Foster: I declare an interest and remind the House that I am an adviser to two teacher unions. The right hon. Member for Birmingham, SpLkbrcok (Mr. Hattersley) advised members of the Cabinet to talk to each other. He was wasting his breath, because on the few occasions when Cabinet members talk to each other, they do not seem to take any notice of what is said. Indeed, no notice was taken by her Cabinet colleagues of the pleading by the Secretary of State for more cash for education. One would have thought that she would have been bitterly disappointed by that rejection, but if she was, she certainly did not show it today. She painted an amazingly rosy picture of the education service, yet she must know of the deep concerns of all of those who work for, and are involved in, the education service; people who—frankly—deserve far more praise

for their work than they receive. Many of them are wondering why they have had to go through so much to achieve so little.
I shall take just one example—class size, which has been referred to several times. As a result of the Government's figures, we now know that the number of primary pupils in classes of more than 30 has risen by 19 per cent. in the past two years—more than a million primary school pupils are now in classes of more than 30 and, in England alone, almost 100,000 children are in classes of more than 36 pupils. A similar picture of increased class sizes is emerging for secondary schools.
The Government used to believe that class size mattered. It is interesting to reflect that the 1983 Conservative manifesto boasted:
The average number of children per teacher is the lowest ever".
Even later, the Conservatives still thought that class size mattered. The 1987 Conservative manifesto boasted:
There are more teachers in proportion to pupils than ever before".
Only now, when the situation is worsening, have they changed their tune.
The Minister of State told the House:
there is no proven causal connection between class size and educational output."—[Official Report, 13 December 1994; Vol. 251, c. 767.]
The Minister is nodding to confirm that that is what he said.
The hon. Gentleman should know that Sir John Cassels, a distinguished member of the National Commission on Education, certainly did not agree with him when he spoke on the radio only last night. I am sure that by now he must be aware of the hundreds of thousands of parents, teachers, governors and pupils who fundamentally disagree with him, and who believe that class size matters.
I wish that the Minister would listen to the views of just one parent, whose opinion was quoted in a survey carried out by Exeter university last year. She said succinctly:
Any half-wit should realise that increasing class size is detrimental to a child's education".
Yet, sadly, class sizes are on the rise, and the quality of education provision is set to fall because of the Government's funding policies.
Last week, I published an analysis of the Government's figures for the money that they expect local education authorities to spend on each pupil—figures that, unlike the Government's attempts to mask the cuts, take into account both inflation and the rising number of pupils. Those figures are startling. After the difficult years that education has already faced, the Government's local government financial settlement this year means that, on average, LEAs in England are being expected to cope with £50 less in real terms for each primary pupil and a staggering £194 less in real terms for each secondary pupil. Realistically, that means a cut of £10,000 in the budget of a 200-pupil primary school and a staggering cut of £126,000 in the budget of a 650-pupil secondary school.
During Prime Minister's questions earlier today the Prime Minister accused my right hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil (Mr. Ashdown) of having his facts wrong. I should like the Minister of State to tell me now whether


those facts, as I believe them to be, are correct or incorrect. The Minister is not rising to speak, so clearly he is confirming that the Government are imposing real cuts.
The hon. Gentleman will also know that in some parts of the country the position is far worse. In Northumberland, for example, some of which is covered by the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith), the cut is £72 per primary pupil and £223 per secondary pupil.
The right hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Dame A. Rumbold) mentioned her concern about what is happening in Merton. I hope that she is as worried as I am about what the Government cut will mean for Merton—a cut of £48 per primary pupil. The right hon. Lady is shaking her head, but that figure is based on the Government's own statistics, updated allowing for inflation. It represents the standard spending assessment per pupil, as supplied by the Government. For Merton it means a cut of £48 per primary pupil and £216 per secondary pupil.

Dame Angela Rumbold: Those are fine figures, but may I remind the hon. Gentleman that there is about £2.5 million of reserves in the balances for education spending alone? I hope that he will take on board the fact that when the council comes to make a budget, as I trust that it will, there will still be money there both for it to budget properly to maintain its teachers and for the necessary spending on children.

Mr. Foster: I am certain that everybody who lives in Merton will have noticed what the right hon. Lady has said. She described cuts of £48 per primary pupil and £216 per secondary pupil as "fine figures". I hope that that will be published far and wide in her constituency.
Far worse cuts are being made in other parts of the country. Because of the inadequacies of the area cost adjustments, in all the south-western counties we shall start from a base of £130 less per pupil even before the cuts that I have mentioned are imposed.
Ministers and other Conservative Members have, of course, already started accusing Opposition Members of crying wolf. It is true that in the past it has been possible for some local education authorities to take money from other service areas and deprive those areas so as to prevent major cuts in the education service, but many of those possibilities have dried up, now that we have had year after year of cuts in the other sectors. Even within many LEAs, the opportunities to take away central support money have now disappeared.
We now see the ludicrous process of Ofsted inspectors travelling round schools identifying problems, and then finding that there is no one left at LEA advisory level to provide the schools with any help in trying to put right what is wrong. Rising pupil numbers are not the only problem. There will be—indeed, there have already been—cuts in the money available for books and equipment in many schools, and there is a shortage of money for repairs and maintenance. There is now a staggering backlog of £4.3 billion worth of repairs and maintenance of school buildings.
What is the point of the Minister promoting much-improved policies for special educational needs work when the money will not be available to carry that work out? Certainly there will be no money available for any of the much-needed expansion in nursery education.
Despite all that, the Minister of State still claims, as he did on 19 December, that
The plea from LEAs that they do not have much money will not wash".—[Official Report, 19 December 1994; Vol. 251, c. 1514.]
He is talking complete hogwash.

Mr. A. J. Beith: What on earth is the Minister saying to authorities such as Northumberland, which last year was allowed an extra £12 million in its standard spending assessment but was told that it could not spend more than £2 million because of the capping limits?

Mr. Foster: My right hon. Friend makes a telling point, revealing not only the absurdity of the local government financial settlement but the lack of understanding of local education authorities that Conservative Members display.
If the Minister and his colleagues take no notice of what I say, or of what the hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) says, I hope that they will at least start to listen to the views expressed by Conservative supporters throughout the country, especially those working as school governors. They know that education has been cut to the bone, and that the Government are now forcing cuts into the bone. Governors are being asked to do more and more, yet are given less and less with which to do it.
Things will get worse unless the Government fully fund the teachers' pay award. Nothing short of full funding immediately will do. The Liberal Democrats are committed to restoring the cuts and to funding the teachers' pay increase in its entirety. We are also committed to further boosting the funding for education, and we have an honest answer to the question of how we shall pay for it. We have made it clear that if there is no other way, we would increase income tax by 1 p in the pound. I hope that the hon. Member for Brightside. or whoever winds up for the Labour party, will give an equally clear explanation of where Labour would find the money.

Mr. Jacques Arnold: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that one way in which money could be released for the sharp end of education would be to cut back the central bureaucracy of an education authority, especially if more than half the secondary schools in the area were grant maintained? The Liberal Democrats in Kent have signally failed to do that.

Mr. Foster: I explained the problems which many local education authorities were having because their central services have been pared to the bone. They are not able to deliver the level of support which many schools are now demanding.
It is crucial that we all understand that, in this increasingly global market, we boost investment in the education service. Despite the weasel words of the Prime Minister and the Government, the Conservative party still prefers to cut education provision in the classroom primarily—as we all know—to save money which is to be stored for possible tax bribes before the next election. The Conservatives are putting their party before the needs of the country.

Mr. Keith Mans: I shall not follow the comments of the hon. Member for Bath (Mr. Foster),


except to say that I had thought that we might hear the odd word about the Liberal Democrats' education policy in relation to grant-maintained schools and the other initiatives which the Government have brought forward. I heard nothing, however, and I can only assume that the hon. Gentleman still believes what he said at the end of 1993, when he pointed out that there was virtually no difference between the Liberal Democrat party's attitude towards education and that of the Labour party.

Mr. Don Foster: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Mans: No, I only have 10 minutes in which to speak. The hon. Gentleman has had his chance to make his points.
Everyone who has spoken in the debate today realises that this year's education settlement is a tight one. It is not fully appreciated that many LEAs—Lancashire being but one—have made a tight settlement for themselves even tighter for their schools. Lancashire, for instance, has had a 1.1 per cent. SSA increase. That has been translated into a 5.5 per cent. decrease in the delegated budget which the Labour-controlled authority has given to the schools under its control.
The only possible conclusion to be drawn from that is that Lancashire and other authorities—mainly controlled by the Liberal Democrats or the Labour party—have given less priority to education this year than has been given in previous years. They may well have had a case if they had increased the delegated budget by the same amount in cash terms as the Government had given them, but they have not done that. Instead, they have cut the budget in real terms.
Instead of demonstrating against Government cuts, the governors and head teachers in Oxfordshire be demonstrating against the cuts imposed by their own county council, and if they wish to set an illegal budget, they consider carefully the consequences of doing so. Where do they think the money for that illegal budget will come from? Are they proposing to increase the public sector borrowing requirement nationally to cope with illegal budgets? Are they proposing a tax increase, or are they proposing that cuts should hit some other part of the community, such as health or community care? Those in Oxfordshire and other parts of the country should pay more attention to the cuts which are being imposed because of overheads at county hall.
In that context, my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster (Dame E. Kellett-Bowman) made a good point in saying that, for every 17 teachers in the county of Lancashire—I suspect the figures are not too different in other counties—there is one bureaucrat. That is where cuts should be imposed.
Across the country, a huge number of surplus places need to be taken out. Many county councils have been bad at being proactive. They have failed to anticipate the numbers coming forward for primary education, and failed to anticipate that there would be a decline in the numbers going into secondary education.

Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman: It is tragic that Lancashire does not take out surplus secondary school places, but very frequently does try to take out primary

places, where there is a deficit. There is a shortage of primary places, yet the council is always trying to close primary places.

Mr. Mans: I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. It is very important that, when one is looking at the number of places required—

Mr. Derek Enright: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Mans: No, I have only 10 minutes.
It is important to ensure that a council takes up the surplus places as soon as possible, otherwise it will not have the money to fund extra primary places. Later in the cycle, the council might have to take out a few primary school places, if the numbers are going down, to fund the extra secondary places that may come along. A lot of LEAs—particularly Lancashire—are bad at that.
If schools feel that, as a result of being under local authority control, they are not getting the full amount of money from the budget that the local authority has been given by the Government, they should seriously consider whether they wish to remain under local authority control. That is the only logical conclusion. If the delegated budgets are cut by more than the amount of money given by the Government, it makes sense for many schools to consider carefully whether they would be better off applying for grant-maintained status.
When grant-maintained schools are created, some of the first people who take up that option for the education of their children are Opposition Members and Labour chairmen of local authorities and of education committees. They all seem to know where the best schools are and they send their children to them, despite the fact that they happen to be grant-maintained schools. That is what is happening in the Labour party. While there are certainly a few Labour Members who do not agree with that view, the fact is that the party's members are voting with their feet and sending their children to the schools that they think will be best for their children. That choice has been provided by this Conservative Government.
I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will explain—not necessarily this evening, but perhaps in the form of a letter—how the figures on the area cost adjustment are arrived at. I am certain that there were good reasons why this was necessary in the past, but I submit that there is now much less of an imbalance in terms of wage costs and other matters between the north and the south. I strongly recommend that my hon. Friend looks closely at the way in which the area cost adjustment applies, particularly in places such as Lancashire, and also further south in places such as Northamptonshire.
I believe sincerely that our education system needs to change, and that it is changing from being essentially a resource and input-led system to a results-led system. It is changing from—in the terms of the Labour party—a grand experiment in social engineering, which is what it was during the 1960s and 1970s, to a system which prepares children properly for life in the world that exists today and that will exist tomorrow. That is why I am sure that the Government's education policy is succeeding, while the policy suggested by the Opposition—although we have yet to hear anything about it—would undoubtedly fail.

Ms Jean Corston: As local education authorities throughout England prepare their budgets, the true size of the cuts in money likely to be available for primary and secondary pupils has been revealed by the Government, via parliamentary questions. West country LEAs have been particularly badly hit, starting as they do from a lower point than other LEAs due to the unfairness of the area cost adjustment. But if one compares the changes in real terms in the budgets for next year with this year through the SSA per pupil, there will be a real cash cut in Avon of £56 for each primary school pupil, and a staggering £184 for each secondary school pupil. Somerset will lose £46 and £176 respectively, and the corresponding figures for Gloucestershire are £41 and £183. On average, in just one year local education authorities are expected to cope with a real-terms cut of 2.5 per cent. or £50 per primary pupil and a draconian 6.9 per cent. or £194 per secondary pupil. Those cuts are in addition to cuts in previous years.
It is even worse in the west country, where the SSA per pupil is £130 below the English average at primary level and £134 at secondary level. Contrast that with the statement made by the Minister of State on 19 December 1994, when he said:
the plea from LEAs that they do not have enough money will not wash".—[Official Report, 19 December 1994; Vol. 251, c. 1514.]
How out of touch can one get?
Last month, the Secretary of State told the North of England conference:
You will still need to find ways of making the money go further".
What does that mean for class sizes, special educational needs, school repairs, and governors' and teachers' morale?
Since January 1992, the number of primary school pupils in classes of more than 30 has increased by 19 per cent. In January 1994, the figure rose to more than 1 million for the first time in many years. In Avon, there has been a staggering increase in the number of primary school children in large classes: between 1992 and 1994, there was a 32 per cent. increase, representing 6,486 more children in classes of more than 30 pupils. The increase in Somerset was 8 per cent.; in Gloucestershire it was 25 per cent.; and in Wiltshire it was an almost unbelievable 45 per cent. I am not surprised that no Conservative Members representing constituencies in Gloucestershire and Wiltshire are in the Chamber today. [Interruption.] May I say to the Minister of State that I am here to speak for the west country on behalf of the Opposition.
What is the Government's response? In 1983, the Conservative party manifesto said:
The average number of children per teacher is the lowest ever",
and in 1987, its manifesto boasted:
There are more teachers in proportion to pupils than ever before".
It presumably made those statements in the belief that the lower the pupil-teacher ratio, the better. People had a right to expect further improvement. Between 1970–71 and 1980–81, pupil-teacher ratios in primary schools improved from 27:1 to 22:3 and in secondary schools from 17:8 to

16:4. But following the unprecedented rises to which I referred, the Minister of State said in the House on 13 December 1994:
There is no proven causal connection between class size and educational output".—[Official Report, 13 December 1994; Vol. 251, c. 767.]
He must know that he is wrong.
In 1994, Professor Neville Bennett of Exeter university undertook a survey of the views of head teachers, chairs of governors, teachers and parents. He found not only a clear consensus that increasing class size adversely affects teaching and learning, but that 90 per cent. of parents with children in classes of more than 30 showed deep satisfaction.
A teacher-governor in my constituency summed up the position admirably when he wrote to me this week saying:
I am unable to give as much attention to each individual's needs as I should, because there are so many others requiring it as well".
What does "making the money go further" mean for school buildings and repairs? The chair of governors of Hanham high school in Avon wrote to me saying that the Department for Education had turned down its application for replacement of what he described as "decrepit, depressing and antiquated" buildings. In my constituency, Bannerman Road school—a two-storey primary school built in 1877—is in desperate need of replacement.
On special educational needs, in two primary schools in my constituency the proportions of children with special educational needs are 50 per cent. and 54 per cent. Teachers try to motivate little children who are identified as having "low self-esteem". The chair of governors of Little Hayes nursery school in Bristol recently wrote to me saying:
I would like to state, on behalf of the Governors of the above-named school, how increasingly worried governing bodies are becoming because of the gradual reduction in worth of monies that Governing bodies are receiving.
As Chair of a school without a delegated budget I am acutely aware of the reduction in services due to the lack of money that Councils are receiving. Services that should have been held centrally for the school to use are no longer there having either been cut completely or having been privatised and are no longer accessible to schools without a delegated budget.
As a country Britain has claimed that Education was for all for over a century, but it now appears that every parent needs to subsidise their local authority, to some extent, to keep their children's schools working.
The Secretary of State says that the money must go further. What planet is she on? If she has £184 less to spend on her household shopping next year, how will she make the money go further? She will have to cut something out. In Avon, the main policy criterion has been to protect the schools' budget, to the detriment of services as diverse as discretionary awards, peripatetic music tuition and new nursery class provision, leading to further protest.
The head teacher of Redcliffe nursery school in my constituency wrote to me saying:
It concerns me greatly that once again Nursery Schools, their children and staff are being discriminated against both at a local and national level. The DFE has made no GEST allocation for nursery schools. This also raises the question of equal opportunities for staff working in Nursery Schools.
She called for an investigation into the DFE's continuing discrimination against nursery schools and asked how that fits with the Government's proposed policy of nursery education for all four-year-olds.
LEAs are powerless to resist that inexorable onslaught. I regret that counties throughout England are facing a dilemma that has been all too familiar in Avon, where restrictions have been placed on spending by capping criteria every year since 1990–91. It is not good enough for Conservative Members to point the finger at LEAs. They should look to their Front Bench, for that is where the blame lies. If they really want more money for our schools, they should join us in the Lobby tonight to condemn the detrimental impact of the 1995–96 settlement on standards and opportunities for our children and young people.

Mr. James Pawsey: May I draw the attention of the House to the motion on the Order Paper in the name of the Leader of the Opposition? The six names of Opposition Members who support it include the shadow Chief Whip and the chairman of the parliamentary Labour party. However, the list does not include the shadow Treasury spokesman, which is a startling omission. Hon. Members may find it deeply significant that no member of the shadow Treasury team is prepared to put his name to the motion. Another extraordinary and startling omission is that the motion does not mention the teachers' pay awards. That shows the true import that Opposition Members attach to today's debate.
The speeches that we have heard from Opposition Members so far have been predictable: the usual demands for more money and the usual silence about where it would come from.

Mr. Don Foster: That is not true of speeches by Liberal Democrat Members.

Mr. Pawsey: On this occasion, I shall excuse the hon. Gentleman from those strictures. He may, however, come in for adverse comments later.
It would be helpful if Opposition Members would occasionally bend their minds, however distasteful that may be, to the sordid problem of money. If they intend to make more funds available to local authorities, through them to the education service and through it to schools, where will they get it from? Do they intend to raise it from taxation or will they make savings in other services? If they take the former route of imposing higher taxes, has that been agreed by the right hon. Member for Dunfermline, East (Mr. Brown)? That is no academic point, because it is crucial and central to today's debate. Hon. Members will understand that there is a world of difference between some vague, well-intentioned phrase quoted in a television studio and a firm, costed, unconditional pledge on how much cash will be provided and when. That is what counts and that will underline the true importance that Opposition Members attach to education. It is no good complaining that funds are inadequate if, at the same time, Opposition Members are not prepared to say where the money will come from.
Like everyone else, I would like more money for education and that is why I applaud the Government for embarking on the remarkable increase in education spending that has occurred since we were first elected in 1979. The Government have increased spending per pupil

by 47 per cent. in real terms, an amount probably without precedent in recent times. Spending on books and equipment is up by 31 per cent. in real terms and teachers have not been forgotten either. Their pay has increased by almost 60 per cent., again in real terms.
Given those substantial increases, I sometimes wonder whether the taxpayer has always received value for money. I suspect that it is only since the Government's reforms of 1988 that educational attainment has shown a real improvement when compared with the 1960s and 1970s. It was, after all, Jim Callaghan who started the great debate in 1976 with his speech at Ruskin college.

Sir Rhodes Boyson: That is right.

Mr. Pawsey: I am delighted to note the assent of my right hon. Friend the Member for Brent, North (Sir R. Boyson).
Hon. Members will recall that the education reforms have included the introduction of the national curriculum and testing; the establishment of Ofsted, to which my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has already referred; the introduction of GCSEs; the local management of schools; and the introduction of grant-maintained schools. All those reforms and a host of other measures are set to improve the quality and standard of state education.

Dr. Keith Hampson: Will my hon. Friend give way?

Mr. Pawsey: My hon. Friend must forgive me, but I just have 10 minutes in which to speak.
Since today's debate is about funding and has been held at the initiative of Her Majesty's Opposition, it is worth considering some of the ideas being actively promoted by the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties. They need some consideration—not a lot—but it would be useful to know exactly where they stand on grant-maintained schools. Will they allow them to continue or not? Some Opposition Members appreciate the benefits of those schools and send their children to them. Let me make it clear immediately that I do not criticise them in any way for that. As parents, they naturally want the best for their children and are able to exercise the freedom and choice given to them and every other parent by the Government. What I and my hon. Friends find unacceptable, however, is that while some Opposition Members send their children to those schools, at the same time other members of the same party are actively seeking their abolition. That suggests a degree of confusion or worse, which is intolerable. [Interruption.] I am glad that I have woken up Opposition Members, because, frankly, their attitude in today's debate is almost dozy. The debate has been held at their initiative, but the fact that so few of them are present shows how much they care about education.
The abolition of grant-maintained schools has spending implications. If Opposition Members want those schools to be returned to local education authorities, what will that cost? Currently those schools are run efficiently and effectively. They give parents what they want for their children, vide the Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition. If those schools are brought back under the control of LEAs to satisfy the ideological views of a small number of small-minded people, it will be at a cost to the education budget.
Another idea mooted by one Opposition spokesman—sadly he is not present this afternoon—is that a graduate tax should be introduced in place of the interest-free


student loan. Perhaps Opposition Members can tell the House what that idea would cost to implement. It would mean, presumably, that the current Student Loans Company would be wound up and new arrangements made through the Inland Revenue. That is unlikely to be a cheap exercise.

Mr. Derek Enright: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Pawsey: No, I am sorry, but I am almost out of time.
It is a truism that one can spend a pound only once. That applies to teachers, books, schools or crack-brained measures designed to satisfy the more socialist instincts of the National Union of Teachers.
On local authority spending, I believe that it is now time to reconsider the capping legislation—I know that a number of hon. Friends share my view. I must add that the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook (Mr. Hattersley) had the courtesy to write to me to say that he intended to mention me in his speech. I wonder how that courtesy compares with that shown by the hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) when he referred to my right hon. Friend the Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Mr. Patten)? I suspect that the right hon. Member for Sparkbrook, who is now not here, remembers the traditions of the House far better than some other Opposition Members.
I am not ashamed to say that I believe that the capping mechanism should now be removed, because the socialist republics that ran some of our great cities in the 1980s—the Manchesters, the Liverpools, the Sheffields and some of the London boroughs—have greatly modified their position in the wake of four successive general election defeats. The capping legislation should therefore be substantially amended to restore to local authorities the right to decide their own level of local spending in accordance the right with perceived local needs, which certainly includes education.

Mr. Michael Clapham: I shall confine my remarks to the effects of the 1995–96 settlement on Barnsley. It has not only highlighted a crisis in education generally, but, in particular, highlighted the problems faced by Barnsley. It threatens the advances that we have made in nursery education provision, but, most worrying of all, it will certainly halt the steady improvements that have been made in primary and secondary educational attainment.
It would appear that, nationally, the Government have been too preoccupied with their policy of featherbedding the private school sector while standards in schools in the public sector have fallen. By allowing that to happen, the sad fact is that the Government are not only failing our children but failing to address the important question of Britain's future. Britain can survive in a competitive global market only if we maintain good educational standards. The educational standards achieved under the Government have not come up to what Ministers would have us believe. For example, a recent survey revealed that one third of 14-year-olds are not mastering basic English, mathematics and science. That survey also revealed that one in six adults has severe literacy and numeracy difficulties. Those educated in the 1960s and

the 1970s fare better than those taught in the 1980s, which contradicts the point made by the hon. Member for Blackpool, South (Mr. Hawkins). I was a teacher in the 1970s and I can at least claim that I helped young people to achieve.
Education in Barnsley has been seriously threatened. We had a long battle to persuade the Minister that the standard spending assessment formula treated Barnsley unfairly. The review of the criteria was hailed as a chance to achieve a fairer distribution of SSAs, but it has not brought any appreciation of our problem—at least, in our experience. This year, for example, Barnsley's maximum expenditure limit is only 0.5 per cent. more than our 1994–95 equivalent budget, which is only 0.5 per cent. greater than the SSA level. That compares with the average allowance above SSAs for metropolitan districts of 4.5 per cent. Obviously, Barnsley has been unfairly treated.
Already music services to schools have been lost as a result of a failure to fund properly in past years. That is an especially hurtful blow in a region that has fought hard to keep some semblance of cultural activities alive in its schools. In addition, the community education programme has been closed, as has the schools swimming programme. All those cuts, caused by a lack of Government funding, add to the demoralisation of a community that has had more than its fair share of knocks.
Between 1991 and 1994, for example, the number of our secondary school pupils has increased by 5 per cent. One would have expected that, in a rational society, the resources that Government provide would at least he proportionate to the pupil increase, but of course we are talking about irrational government.
In a typical Barnsley secondary school, the standstill budget will mean a further steep staff reduction of five teachers. A reduction of five teachers in each school will mean that there will be no special educational needs teaching in the school curriculum. Currently there are 36 periods per week in maths and English for children with special educational needs. At present, 13 additional periods are offered per week for children who have learning difficulties in science classes, but the cut will mean that the number of pupils in classes will increase from 22 to 28. There will also be a reduction in arts and technology teaching. Currently there are 16 periods a week in art, music and information technology. That could disappear altogether, and it would seriously affect the delivery of the national curriculum in those lesson areas.
As recently as a few weeks ago, I attended two school speech days; one at Willowgarth school, on the east side of Barnsley, the other at Penistone grammar school, in my constituency. Willowgarth is situated in the village of Grimethorpe, where the last colliery closure in the Barnsley area took place. The teaching staff are proud of the fact that they have done a first-class job in helping to provide the community with hope and a good school for its children to attend. Now their efforts have been threatened by a lack of funding. The governors at Penistone grammar school told me that they were struggling to ensure that the school could maintain its good record. They were afraid, however, that without a commensurate increase in resourcing to meet the increase in pupil numbers the school and, more importantly, the community, would lose out.
Barnsley has been confronted by some severe spending pressures in education. For example, the number of children with a statutory entitlement to free meals increased by 58 per cent., from 6,081 in 1990 to 9,591 in 1994, resulting in an increased cost of £1 million. The number of children eligible for a clothes grant has increased in the same period by 54 per cent. and now stands at almost 11,000, resulting in an increased cost of £200,000.
Special educational needs have increased at an alarming rate: from 1.3 per cent. of pupils in 1990 to 3.1 per cent. to date. That has resulted in an extra cost of £3.2 million.
Another increased spending pressure that will obviously bear heavily on Barnsley is the funding of the teachers' pay settlements. The School Teachers Review Body will recommend a 2.7 per cent. increase. The increase must be paid, but I urge the Minister to impress on Government that it must be met by Government funding, rather than leaving it to local authorities.
The sad thing is that the cuts have come at a time when things have been steadily improving in Barnsley schools. Although the Department for Education's league tables show that Barnsley schools are considerably below the national average, the overall school performance index illustrates an improvement between 1989 and 1994. Now the progress and the achievement of individual schools are threatened by financial constraints.
Barnsley is an authority that works well with its governing bodies. In the past year, the town has held the first educational conference for governors and staff. That was followed by a series of meetings, when a vision statement of the education service was developed and its aims and objectives were established. The tragedy is that the objectives are now placed in jeopardy by the budget.
Finally, I urge the Minister to ask the Secretary of State for Education to bring pressure to bear on the Secretary of State for the Environment to meet Barnsley's council leaders and to consider sympathetically a formula that will allow the Barnsley community to progress towards its educational objectives.

Mr. Pawsey: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. During my remarks I may not have mentioned the fact that I am a parliamentary adviser to the Association of Teachers and Lecturers. If I did not do so, may I ask that it now be recorded in the Official Report?

Mr. Deputy Speaker: The hon. Member did not declare that interest earlier. I am grateful that he has now remembered to do so.

Mr. David Nicholson: The hon. Member for Bath (Mr. Foster) spoke this afternoon and also spoke on local government finance last week, although I believe that the Liberal Democrats' local government finance spokesman is the hon. Member for Newbury (Mr. Rendel). On both occasions, the hon. Member for Bath rather glancingly criticised the area cost adjustment and the way in which it is calculated. Perhaps the reason why the hon. Member for Newbury is not present this afternoon and was silent last week is that the county in which his constituency lies, Berkshire, benefits from the area cost adjustment.
On local government finance in general, the Liberals in the west country are campaigning heavily about the area cost adjustment, and we also heard from the Labour Member for Bristol, East (Ms Corston).
We need to be realistic. Conservative Members agree with the Minister for Local Government, Housing and Urban Regeneration about considering the issue and trying to resolve it in the coming year, but the idea that there is a bag of gold at the end of the rainbow that will resolve all these budgetary problems is far-fetched.
The hon. Member for Bath also referred to the Liberal policy of an increase in income tax of a penny in the pound to finance education, one of the Liberal Democrats' supposedly popular policies. Those who study the Liberal Democrats' pledges and policies believe that the actual cost would amount to 2.5 pennies in the pound. However, for every constituent who wants a penny or 2.5p spent on education, there will be some who want the same amount or more to be spent on law and order, defence, health or pensions and social security. Before we have gone very far, we shall be well in excess of a 30p in the pound basic rate of income tax. I hope that the House will consider that.
The response of Conservative Members of Parliament with constituencies in Somerset to the local government finance settlement was made in the speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Robinson) last Wednesday. I am glad to see him in the Chamber. I should like to take some of those arguments further, because there has been a hysterical campaign, not only in Somerset but in Devon.
Schools have been given indicative budgets. Sespiteincreases in Government assistance and despite increases—albeit small—in the amount that Somerset and Devon can spend up to the capping limit, those schools have been told to make substantial cuts in their budgets. Therefore, conclusions are being drawn about the number of teacher redundancies that might result.
Not surprisingly, people are worried; some are very angry. There have been marches. My hon. Friends and I have had many letters. We have had petition forms, referring, I may say, to a cut in Government support—and, as I said, there has been no cut in Government support. That is a typical lie.
The Conservative county councillors in Somerset have proposed alternatives to the Liberal budget, but the response, rather curiously, of the ruling majority party is to say, "There is no alternative." The Liberal Democrats plan to go ahead with their indicative budgets, their sacking of teachers and their causing of deep chaos in schools in my constituency and those of my hon. Friends.
In addition to the alternative budgets of Conservative county councillors, I have a few more points to consider. Last year, Somerset county council increased its staff by 500—so it was not exactly the tight year that some people have suggested. It claimed that 200 teachers would have to be sacked last year, but instead 98 teachers and 166 classroom assistants were recruited.
A note from the Library, which is based on a written answer from 17 October 1994, shows how much of their education budget the various local education authorities have delegated to schools. Somerset is about a third of the way up the list, with 86.2 per cent. of its total education budget delegated to schools. The hon. Member for Bath—I am glad to see that he is in his place—referred to


Northumberland. During the same period, it delegated 88.9 per cent. of its education budget to schools. At the top of the list is Hertfordshire, which delegated 91.3 per cent. of its education budget to schools, and Berkshire delegated 90 per cent. Of course, schools would have more money if Somerset and other local authorities delegated more of their education budgets to them.
Reference was also made to the balances held by schools. I appreciate that some schools have deliberately saved balances year after year in order to fund specific projects. Therefore, I do not wish to encourage schools to dig deep into their funding reserves or spend their balances in one year. A written answer of 19 January 1995, at column 641 of Hansard, to a question from my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby and Kenilworth (Mr. Pawsey), shows that Somerset has £6.6 million in school balances. It is interesting to compare that with Devon, which has a much larger pupil population, at £10.3 million.
Those councillors in Somerset who are anxious to save mainstream education services might consider some perhaps more controversial proposals. For example, they could reverse, or at least postpone, the Liberal policy to have children start school at a younger age—the rising fives issue. The previous Conservative administration made a rather controversial decision about that and saved a considerable amount of money. That decision has now been reversed, but I believe that at least a postponement would save money.
We also have to look at the cost of maintaining very small schools. A school in my constituency that is about to close has only 12 pupils and at the time of the previous financial assessment it had 15 pupils. I do not see how one can make effective education provision for a school of that size. The school received funding of £70,00() and, as the Member of Parliament for that area, I found it very difficult to justify that sort of financial commitment.
In conclusion, I refer to the important matter of the forthcoming pay award for teachers. Since 1990 there has been an average increase of 36 per cent. in teachers' pay, which contrasts with a 23 per cent. increase for the whole economy. Teachers have not fared badly in recent years and we want to see that trend continue. We want to maintain recruitment levels and maintain and improve morale in the teaching profession.
I pay tribute to the work of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State in that respect. She inherited certain difficulties when she assumed her post, to which other hon. Members have referred. I have said harsh things about her predecessor and I do not wish to return to them. I am sure that all hon. Members recognise the difficult position that the Secretary of State inherited when she took over the job and we appreciate the progress that she has made.
We must leave it to my right hon. Friend to judge how far she will go with the review body's recommendations. She must make the right decisions and she faces a difficult task. She may decide to phase in some of the recommendations, but if she decides to implement all of them at or above the level of inflation, she must expect the support of her Cabinet colleagues in dealing with the problems that will arise from meeting the pay increase.
For example, I was glad that my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby and Kenilworth mentioned the capping limit, which will he reviewed next year. Perhaps the Secretary of State will have to look at it this year.

Conservative Members support capping as a way of dealing with authorities that have no regard for the financial burdens that they place on their constituents. In view of the recent reforms of local government finance, we should look carefully at the concept of capping as a way for the Treasury to decide the meticulous funding arrangements of fairly responsible local authorities. I have my arguments with Somerset, but I would not describe it as a Lambeth or a Camden.
We must look at the capping limit next year and we must maintain pressure on the Secretary of State for Education and the Secretary of State for the Environment in order to secure a better settlement next year. If we can expect a better settlement next year, local authorities may be convinced to hold the line this year in the face of what we all accept is a very tough financial settlement.

Mr. Mike O'Brien: I am sorry that the hon. Member for Rugby and Kenilworth (Mr. Pawsey)—my Conservative colleague from Warwickshire—is not in his seat because he raised some points in his speech to which I wish to refer.
The hon. Gentleman talked about Labour's views on grant-maintained schools. To my knowledge, no Labour Front-Bench spokesperson has said that parents should not send their children to GM schools. We are concerned about the lack of local democratic accountability in GM schools, the unfair comparative funding arrangements arid the entry criteria in some schools. The Labour party's aim is to ensure that every pupil benefits from fair funding, that each GM school has an element of local democratic accountability, and that the entry criteria provide equal opportunities for all. I also remind the hon. Gentleman--no doubt he will read it in Hansard tomorrow—that Kenilworth secondary school in his constituency, which has a fine reputation for high academic standards, is a comprehensive school that has not opted out.
Parents in Warwickshire are very angry about the funding cuts in children's education. Parents and teachers are angry because 200 teaching jobs may be lost and class sizes will increase. In some schools, there are as many as 40 pupils in a class. Standards will inevitably fall and the provision of special needs education will be reduced, affecting the most vulnerable pupils. Section 11 funding will also be cut and I have been told that that could result in the loss of three teachers from one school.
The anger is not confined to Opposition politicians, parents, teachers or governors. In Warwickshire, Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative councillors have united in criticising the financial settlement's impact. The Government would have us believe that it is all about overspending local authorities that are unable to make proper budget savings. However, the headmaster of St. Francis primary school in Bedworth, Mr. Seamus Crowe, has said that the argument of parents and teachers
is not with the county council but with the Government".
Conservative politicians in Warwickshire are supporting Labour's case—but it is not Labour's case; it is the case of the children, the parents and the governors who want to see decent education standards in that county. Warwickshire has always been a prudent local authority; it was praised in its recent audit report. It was poll tax capped only when it was under Conservative control—for two years running. Warwickshire has always been a relatively low spender per pupil on education. If it were


to comply with the Government's standard spending assessment, it would have to cut its education budget by £10 million, despite the fact that it is such a low spender. If it made the cuts in its standard spending assessment that the Government seem to suggest, it would probably fall through the statistical floor on education spending.
When I made similar points in a debate last week on the financial settlement, the Secretary of State for the Environment suggested that I was making a plea for special treatment for Warwickshire and that other counties disagreed with the claim. One can imagine his surprise when the reply came not from the Opposition but from behind him. I quote with approval the comments of the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Mr. Howarth):
Warwickshire is not asking for special treatment, but for a fair deal. Our frustration is that year after year after year our representations appear to be ignored. It is no surprise that in a zero-sum game other local authorities are not interested in easing Warwickshire's position. If we care about the quality of our democracy, we should be strengthening the independence and scope of elected local government for which a strong mechanism of accountability now exists through the council tax. Does my right hon. Friend agree that our future quality of life, as well as our economic competitiveness, depends to a large extent on whether we invest in our schools? I therefore very much regret the Government's proposals for capping and SSAs—certainly as they bite in Warwickshire—which run counter to all these purposes."—[Official Report, 1 February 1995; Vol. 253, c. 1113.]
Those were the words of a Conservative Member for Warwickshire, so it has nothing to do with party politics. It is not special pleading; it is concern that the impact on schools in Warwickshire is so damaging that even the Conservatives in the county are concerned about it.
The hon. Member for Rugby and Kenilworth, who I am pleased to see has now resumed his seat, said that the cap must be removed and I agree with him, certainly for Warwickshire. I welcome the conversion of the hon. Gentleman to Labour party policy for Warwickshire.
There has been a long campaign by Warwickshire Members and councillors to change the SSA criteria, and it has been supported by all parties. Claims of lax council spending will not wash in Warwickshire; it is plain unfair victimisation of the children of Warwickshire by the Government.
The education budget has already been cut to the bone. Discretionary awards have been cut in Shakespeare's county, where if young people want to become actors, they cannot get a discretionary award to do it. May I make a special plea as a lawyer? When I was young, I was able to get a grant to pursue my legal career. That is barely possible now; in practice, it is impossible. The opportunities offered to previous generations no longer seem to be available in Warwickshire.
The youth service budget has been halved. One third of primary classes have more than 30 pupils; 10 per cent. of classes have more than 35 pupils; and, if cuts are imposed this year, many will have more than 40 pupils. Pupil-teacher ratios are in the bottom quartile of LEAs in England and Wales, and the county has already made 20 per cent. savings in administration and elsewhere to put £2 million into primary schools.
Education spending per head in Warwickshire has fallen to 96 per cent. of the English county average, while our school-age population is 2.5 per cent. above the English county average. So the county is not only efficiently run; it has cut services to the bone.
The 1995 budget is balanced only by no contribution to the education budget for any pay or price increases, by not providing any of the £1 million needed to fund the extra 874 pupils in Warwickshire schools next year and an overall 2.5 per cent. reduction in all budgets. That totals a cut of £9 million for Warwickshire's education department, because of the cuts and increased spending pressures.
This year, a primary school pupil will be worth £1,024 until April, but after April the figure will be £993. The contribution for a 15-year-old is £1,864, but after April it will fall to £1,807. In my constituency, the effect on Polesworth comprehensive, which is to take 62 extra pupils, will be £112,000 slashed off the budget. Race Leys middle school at Bedworth will lose £43,000 and two teachers. St. Francis RC primary school in Bedworth will lose a teacher and have classes of more than 40 pupils.
On Friday, I spoke to the headmaster of Nicholas Chamberlaine comprehensive school, who told me that the school faces budget cuts identified by the county of £70,000, including a deficit carried forward because the school was unable to meet the 2 per cent. underfunded pay rises for 1994–95 of £30,000. If staff pay rises for 1995–96 are not funded, the school will face a further reduction of £36,000a cut of £136,000 in one school budget.
The school has identified the following proposals to make those savings. Seven teachers will have to go. Class sizes will be increased by two thirds across the board, with significant health and safety implications as some workshops cannot properly accommodate full classes. There will be fewer choices at GCSE, with no minority A-level subjects such as religious education or German and fewer books for pupils. The school fabric, which is already deteriorating, will not be able to have the repairs that it needs. There will be no capital investment in any new equipment. Information technology provision will deteriorate further and the school library has already closed. How in all conscience can any Government say that they care about education, yet seek to force such cuts?
I could explain the effect of the cuts on other schools in Warwickshire, but Warwickshire needs—

Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Janet Fookes): Order. Time is up.

Mr. Jacques Arnold: Like a number of hon. Members in the Chamber this afternoon, I come from Kent, a county that faces a 1 per cent. cut in the delegated budget for schools. It is the first time that that has ever happened in the county of Kent. No provision has been made for any increase in the pay of teachers. It has been imposed by the Liberal Democrat-Labour pact which is now controlling Kent county council.
It is particularly disgraceful given that the Government funding for Kent county council is increasing by 2.1 per cent. in the coming year. One might ask why the council has got the county into such a predicament. During the first two years of control by the Lib-Lab pact, the co-chairs of education were breezing around the county


playing Lady Bountiful and distributing sweeties to an extent that would have shamed Evita Peron. The council spent the £20 million windfall that arose from interest rates on the council debt being very much less than forecast. It blew those funds. It now faces finding some £6.5 million to pay for higher interest rates.
Needless to say, the council does not have the money. It has blown the £10 million proceeds of land sales negotiated by the previous Conservative Administration. It has held sharp conferences at four-star hotels, such as the Great Danes hotel at Maidstone and the Imperial at Hythe, with left-wing academics and pressure group spokesmen. Those conferences cost thousands of pounds of council tax payers' money.
The council spent further thousands of pounds on anti-grant-maintained schools campaigns and propaganda and, only recently, it spent £4,100 on propaganda leaflets sent to the parents of school children in Kent.
Perhaps the most criminal of all is the obesity of the central educational bureaucracy in Kent. In Kent, we are proud that 88 of our schools have decided to become grant-maintained—44 of them decided when the county was under Conservative control and 44 further schools decided to do so under Liberal and Labour control. Under the Conservatives, 174 administrators' jobs went. Under Labour and the Liberal Democrats, the central education administration of Kent county council has increased from 965 to 1,162 full-time equivalent staff. That is a 20 per cent. increase in the central administration of education that cost millions of pounds.
It is quite clear that the Lib-Lab pact has no intention to cut proportionately the central administration of education. Had it done so for the 44 schools that have gone grant maintained under its period of control, £6.5 million could have been saved and spent on the schools budget. It has not cut the central administration to reflect the departure of the further education colleges of Kent into independence or of the Kent careers service. Not only is it keeping up the spending on the central bureaucracy, it is increasing it. It has made no provision for an increase in teachers' pay, but it has made provision for an increase in the pay of the education bureaucrats right up to the overpaid director of education now spending his time on political campaigning.
Kent county council's bureaucracy is now so bloated that the county auditors have recommended an inquiry into education support and administration services and their structures. So determined has the Lib-Lab pact been to preserve the bureaucracy that in this year of cuts it has decided to make a provision of £480,000 to replace funds expected to be taken by schools when they become grant maintained during the course of the year.
Where has the Kent Lib-Lab pact decided to make its cuts? It has decided to cut 1 per cent. off school budgets. It has decided that there shall be no more discretionary awards for vocational courses at further education colleges and no more help for school transport for youngsters of 16 and older from poorer families going to their place of education. It has decided to cut 20 per cent. off adult education in the county and £2 million off school buildings maintenance. But it has decided to cut only £800,000 off central services. The cuts fall on the sharp end as usual.
The cuts proposed by the coalition of the Labour party and the Liberal Democrats—I notice that the Liberal Democrat education spokesman is so embarrassed that he has abandoned his seat—

Mr. Don Foster: I am over here.

Mr. Arnold: The proposed cuts are so nasty that the two Lady Bountifuls—[Interruption.]

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. It is no longer possible for me to hear the hon. Gentleman because of the noise from the Opposition Benches.

Mr. Arnold: The Opposition parties clearly do not want to hear the facts. The people of Kent should be told what is going on. It is significant that the two Lady Bountifuls, the co-chairs, are nowhere to be seen. They have left it to the director of education to argue a political case for the Lib-Lab cuts programme. The cuts are provocative. They hit the public and the school children. They have been made for clear party-political reasons. They are a smoke screen.
We have heard speeches this afternoon from several hon. Members from counties and boroughs which may have been squeezed, but Kent has not. The politicians in Kent want to keep up with the Joneses and in order to do so they have hit Kent schools hard. They have cut £1 l million from the education budget rather than from the bureaucracy. The grant-maintained school issue alone is worth £6.5 million. They could have cut the administration for further education and for the career service which is no longer provided. They could have cut the propaganda. I have asked the leader of the council to cost the conferences and the propaganda.

Several hon. Members: rose—

Mr. Arnold: They could also utilise the underspent part of the education standard spending assessment which is the equivalent of £14.2 million.

Hon. Members: Give way.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. That is a decision that must be made by the hon. Member who has the Floor, not by others in sedentary positions.

Mr. Arnold: The Lib-Lab pact could have cut the £11 million from the £27 million of the central departments which also have provisions for a pay increase. It could have used the windfalls from lower interest rates and land sales amounting to £30 million which the Lib-Lab pact has blown. It could also use Kent county council's reserves.

Mr. Dunn: Can my hon. Friend confirm that the political leaflet issued by the director of education on the authority of the Lib-Lab co-chairmen was delivered to staff at grant-maintained schools but was not shown to governing bodies who had no knowledge of it, and that some head teachers in north-west Kent refused to deliver the leaflet because they felt it to be political?

Mr. Arnold: The leaflet was run out so fast that I am told that even the chief executive of the county council did not see it, so desperate was the Lib-Lab pact to pre-empt the results of its own folly.
My only conclusion from this sorry disgrace of a cut in Kent's school budgets, which has never happened before, is that the Lib-Lab pact that is running Kent county council is either incompetent or playing politics.

Mr. Roy Hughes: I have no wish to proceed down the leafy lanes of Kent, which has been described as the garden of England. My contribution is the first to be made by an hon. Member representing a Welsh consistency.
The debate is most timely because there is a basic need to highlight the crisis in our schools brought about as a result of the local authority settlement. In the process, our children have been sold short and that in turn means that we will not reap the benefits of their potential tomorrow. Education is vital to Britain's international competitiveness and economic efficiency.
It has been said many times that charity begins at home. I have received a letter dated 6 January from Mr. J. P. Walsh, the Gwent county treasurer. He pointed out that when Gwent prepared its base budget it aimed to protect vital services such as education, but it was found that an increase of £14 million would be needed just to stand still and without restoring earlier cuts.
Under the settlement terms, Gwent county council was allowed to increase its budget by only 0.5 per cent., or £1.4 million. There was, therefore, a need to reduce spending by £12.5 million. Of that sum, £7 million will be taken from reserves, but the remaining £5.5 million will need to be found by making cuts. Mr. Walsh went on to say that for education that would mean a cut of £2.4 million and that schools could be affected. I took that matter up with the Welsh Office. On 26 January the Under-Secretary of State for Wales agreed that the settlement was tough, but he called for further efficiency improvements.
Long ago, it was said that it is the wearer who knows where the shoe pinches. I have received a letter dated 5 December from Mr. M. J. McCarthy, the headteacher of St. Gabriel's Roman Catholic primary school in my constituency. He pointed out that the recent inspectors' report on the school was highly favourable and that it was particularly pleasing to receive such a report because the school serves an economically deprived area.
Yet Mr. McCarthy said:
We have recently heard that the schools budget for 1995–96 is to be substantially reduced and this despite careful management of previous budgets which have regularly produced a small surplus at the end of each financial year. The proposed budget reduction will result in the loss of one of the teachers who helps to make this school such a success. Resources will be stretched to the limit, the composition of classes will be affected and it will be more difficult for the remaining staff to provide the levels of care and support that have hitherto been the case.
Mr. McCarthy proceeded to call on me as the Member of Parliament for the area to intervene with the authorities on behalf of the school. The basic point that I wish to make is that the position in that school is the direct result of the self-described "tough" policy being implemented by the Welsh Office and the Department for Education.
Since the correspondence to which I have referred, I have received a flood of letters from concerned parents who are anxious about the welfare and future education of their children. Typical of those is Mrs. A.E. Morris of 16, Llanwern road, Newport. She writes:
My daughter Sian and my son Rhys both attend the above school,"—
St. Gabriel's—
I am concerned to learn that because of rules which govern funding, St. Gabriel's is to lose a teacher…which I find totally unacceptable.
She calls for "swift and appropriate" action to remedy the situation. I heartily endorse that.
The situation in St. Gabriel's has happened and is happening in other schools in Newport. Indeed, the education cuts in Newport are mirrored throughout the country, as we have witnessed in the debate this evening. Yet education is vital to social cohesion and social justice, about which the Prime Minister claims to be so concerned. I am reminded of the words of Dickens in "A Tale of Two Cities":
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times".
Let us update those words a little. It is certainly a good time for Sir Iain Valiance, the chairman of British Telecommunications plc. I did a little research in the Library on his remuneration and emoluments and found that, up to 31 March 1994, he received a salary of £465,000 plus bonuses of £185,000. Other benefits total £13,000, making a total of £663,000 per annum. He also had pension payments of £43,000 and what are known as "unfunded" pension contributions of a further £51,000. He had shares amounting to £17,084 and share options totalling £612,659—

Mr. John Carlisle: On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I wonder whether you can help me on the relevance of what the hon. Member for Newport, East (Mr. Hughes) is saying to the debate on the financial settlement for schools 1995–96.

Madam Deputy Speaker: I am usually fairly tolerant when hon. Members make a passing reference or seek to make some short comparison. I am less happy when it becomes extended and the main point of the debate becomes lost. The hon. Member for Newport, East is fast getting to that point.

Mr. Hughes: I have come to the end of the point that I wanted to make. I would say, however, that, compared with Sir Iain Valiance of BT, it is not so good for the children in our state schools at the present time, particularly those in socially deprived areas, as I have illustrated in the case of St. Gabriel's Roman Catholic primary school in Newport.
It is time for the Government to loosen the purse strings and to change their policies root and branch, otherwise the classes will "shoot up"—to use the words of the present Secretary of State for Education. Instead, though, the Government are carrying out a policy of austerity, with a view to creating some sort of economic bonanza, as we approach the general election. The education of our children is too important to be treated in that way. After 15 years in office, the Government are unlikely to change. The leopard does not change its spots. It is time for the Government to give way to a Labour Administration, who will fully recognise the importance of education and fund it accordingly.

Mr. Patrick McLoughlin: I do not want to follow the speech of the hon. Member for Newport, East (Mr. Hughes), but I would say to my hon. Friend the Minister of State that I do not want him to depart from the policies that the Government have maintained since 1979, because to do so would mean reversing the increase of nearly 50 per cent. in spending on schools that we have seen. I very much support increasing funding for schools when the economic climate allows. The very fact that we have managed to do that since 1979 is a tribute to the way in which we have run the economy. We have not had to introduce massive slashing programmes, as happened in 1976 when the Labour party was in Government. That is what we inherited.
I urge my hon. Friend, therefore, to pursue with vigour the policies that the Conservative party and the Government have followed. They are the policies that are condemned by the Opposition one day but held up the next as though they invented them. We have seen that time and again. Indeed, I read at the weekend of the chief education officer in Liverpool, who last year sent a letter to all parents telling them that schools should not become grant maintained, only to send his own child to just such a school. That is the kind of educational hypocrisy that we hear from the left of the Labour party these days.
I pay tribute to all the teachers in our schools who work so hard to achieve the improvement that we have seen in examination results. It is a credit to the parents and to the teachers. Some of the nonsensical decisions have been removed from local education authorities as a direct result of the policy which allows schools to become grant maintained and thus freed from the shackles of the local authority.
In March 1987, when I had just entered the House, my hon. Friend the Member for Dartford (Mr. Dunn) answered an Adjournment debate. Some 170 parents came and sat in the Strangers Gallery to exercise their right to make representations through their Member of Parliament and to the Minister about the saving of the sixth form in Ecclesbourne school. It was one of the first schools in Derbyshire to become grant maintained. What the county council tried to do—to take away the sixth forms—was nonsense. That school has gone from strength to strength since becoming grant maintained.

Mr. Harry Barnes: rose—

Mr. Enright: rose—

Mr. McLoughlin: I understand that Netherthorpe school is in the constituency of the hon. Member for Derbyshire, North-East (Mr. Barnes). The head of that school, which is now grant maintained, recently said:
We have been grant-maintained for 4½ years. The advantages include: more effective decision making; money nearer to the students (more books; equipment; teachers; non-teaching staff; better maintained buildings). Better staff training. Increased parental support.
I think that we should be shouting from the top—

Mr. Barnes: On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. As I am in the House, is it in order for the hon. Member for West Derbyshire (Mr. McLoughlin) to comment on a school in my constituency but not to give way so that I can make a counter-argument?

Madam Deputy Speaker: That is not a point of order for the Chair. The tradition of the House is well known: it is up to the hon. Member who has the Floor to decide whether to give way.

Mr. McLoughlin: The problem, Madam Deputy Speaker, is the shortness of time.
Over the past 14 years, Derbyshire county council has subsidised school meals to the tune of some £100 million. When I challenged the hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) on that matter, he said that he was informed that I have not been short of school meals. Indeed, I have not—nor, I suggest, has his hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Kilfoyle), who will shortly be winding up for the Opposition. The hon. Member for Brightside did not comment at all on whether he thought that it was a good thing that Derbyshire had expended some £100 million in the past 14 years on subsidising school meals. If that £100 million had been given directly to schools, Derbyshire's education would be in a far better state today.
Derbyshire allocates less to schools than any other shire county. There is more money to be allocated to schools. Before talking about cutting the number of teachers, Derbyshire should ask itself whether its administration is as efficient as it might be. We have a right to ask why it is not giving money directly to schools.

Mr. Barnes: rose—

Mr. McLoughlin: The hon. Gentleman has already asked me to give way. He must realise that I cannot do so, because the winding-up speeches are about to begin.
I end by saying that the flexibility is available to allow county councils to put more money into schools.

Mr. Peter Kilfoyle: I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook (Mr. Hattersley) on the way in which he speared the Government. I also congratulate my hon. Friends the Members for Bristol, East (Ms Corston), for Warwickshire, North (Mr. O'Brien), for Barnsley, West and Penistone (Mr. Clapham) and for Newport, East (Mr. Hughes), who—unlike many Conservative Members—did what a Member of Parliament is supposed to do: they defended the interests of their constituents, and they did so very eloquently.
When the right hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Mr. Patten) was replaced by the right hon. Member for Norfolk, South-West (Mrs. Shephard) as Secretary of State for Education, many saw the right hon. Lady as a lamb going among the educational wolves. She was to be the great conciliator—the professional whose experience and commitment would correct the imbalance caused by the disastrous tenure of her predecessors. The right hon. Lady came as sweetness and light to the chaos inflicted on pupils, teachers, parents and governors, and her initial input appeared benevolent. She rapidly moved on to ground long occupied by the Opposition Front Bench: she cleared the confusion over the Government's intentions in regard to standard attainment tests and amended the national curriculum following the excessive demands originally made by the Government. The commentators spoke of the refreshingly engaging style of


the Secretary of State—a person who was at home in the job, far removed from the ideologues in her party who pressed for ever more radical change for its own sake.
All of that was dispelled by the leaking of the Secretary of State's letter to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. She was revealed in that letter, which was printed in full in The Times Educational Supplement on 20 January, as—I hope that the right hon. Lady will pardon the pun—not a lamb but, in education terms, a wolf in chic clothing. That missive contained a clinical analysis of the political cost to the Government of the 1995–96 education settlement; nowhere was there a hint of the huge educational loss to our country, the frustration of parents, the undermining of teachers, the disenchantment of governors or the injury to pupils. What the Secretary of State did say, unequivocally, was that—as my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) pointed out—up to 10,000 teaching jobs would go, and class sizes would rocket. Even when she wrote that letter, the right hon. Lady knew full well what the results of the Government's parsimony would be. It
would be seen as provocative",
she wrote; there would be
a renewed battle with the teachers".
Crucially, she concluded that
it would be a great pity to lose the ground we have gained and face new disruption in our schools".
How right she was.
It appears, however, that the Secretary of State's political plea has fallen on deaf ears. The long years of confrontation in education were prematurely written off. According to The Times and The Daily Telegraph today, the Government are about to take on not only the teachers but the school governors, which will mean increased turmoil for our children—to the outrage of their parents. Those parents know exactly whom to blame. The Secretary of State herself said:
Pupil numbers next year will go up by 1.5 per cent., so an increase"—
in education spending—
of 0.3 per cent. implies a cash fall. The increase could make no contribution towards any pay award: staffing ratios will have to be tightened to balance the books before LEAs even start to consider how to fund the pay settlement".
The Secretary of State said much in her speech today about the bureaucracy which allegedly remained in local education authorities. She had the temerity to quote the Office for Standards in Education, so I will do the same. According to paragraph 224 of Ofsted's report,
Almost all LEAs have experienced significant reductions in staff numbers in the last five years.
Paragraph 226 states:
Where budgets were reduced, LEAs generally sought to protect schools by improving economies in their own administration cost".
Paragraph 227 states that support services are
extensively used and generally valued by schools, including grant-maintained schools.
It does not seem to me that Ofsted was condemning LEAs: quite the reverse—it was giving credit where it was due and praising LEAs which do a tremendous job in difficult circumstances.
Peculiarly, given the way in which the Government have operated historically, the shire counties are likely to be hit most heavily. Essex has had £1.4 million cut from

its assessment, but faces an extra bill of £8.5 million, which means a £9.9 million shortfall. Northumberland will face a similar shortfall of £5.4 million.

Mr. Jack Thompson: That figure is correct. Northumberland has a special problem, because it operates a three-tier system. Four fifths of the population live in one corner, while the remaining one fifth inhabit the rural parts. If schools in Northumberland are closed, they will be closed in the rural parts, which are Tory dominated.

Mr. Kilfoyle: It is a sad fact that rural areas will be hit as much as metropolitan areas were in the past, although metropolitan authorities will suffer nearly as much: Birmingham faces a shortfall of £8.1 million, and St Helens a shortfall of £4.9 million.
As the hon. Member for Rugby and Kenilworth (Mr. Pawsey), a noted educationist, is present, I will also cite Warwickshire, whose 300 schools have £57 million in unspent balances. Unspent balances are part of the Government's argument, but Warwickshire's balances are unevenly spread: one third of schools have no balances, one third have modest balances of between 2 and 3 per cent., while the remaining third hold sufficient reserves to cater for the worst effects of the 5.8 per cent. reduction in the real value of their budgets in 1995–96 but nothing for 1996–97. The council estimates that between 140 and 200 teaching jobs will go, probably to be joined by 23 section 11-funded jobs. In addition, class sizes will go over the 40 mark.
Croft middle school in Nuneaton represents a microcosm of Warwickshire's dilemma, which in turn epitomises what is happening throughout the country. It is a popular school, oversubscribed by 19—if we take the standard number—with a roll of 299. A special educational needs audit under the new code of practice, using nationally recognised criteria, revealed 134 children—some 43 per cent.—with level 1, 2 and 3 needs. The school has reserves of £14,523, but those reserves are already committed to teaching and support services for the final quarter of the school year 1994–95—not the financial year. Its budget allocation in 1994–95 totalled £425,385. Its allocation for next year, including the allowance for extra pupil adjustment, will be only £400,235. In real terms, that means the loss of two teaching posts to a middle school in middle England—12.4 posts rather than 14.4—and huge classes.In 1994, the fifth year in the school contained classes of 27, 26 and 29; in 1995 there will be two classes of 38 and 39. In year six, there were two classes of 35 and 34 in 1994; those will become two classes of 41 each in 1995. How does that relate to the Secretary of State's proclaimed wish for stability in our schools and the raising of standards?
Reference has been made to the role of the Treasury and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I hope that the Chancellor will feel able to go along to Abbey Road primary school in his constituency and explain why it will lose £21,000 next year—or perhaps he should visit Cotgrave Highfield primary school, which will lose £20,000. A total of £442,000 will be taken from 41 primary schools in the Chancellor's constituency to fund tax cuts at the next general election. But even that is generous compared with what is happening in secondary schools in the Chancellor's constituency. They are to lose


£551,000 between them. Does he think that voters' memories will be so short as not to take note of that when the election comes?
There will be less chance to address the problems of literacy and numeracy, which were highlighted by the adult literacy and basic skills unit. In recent years, the reading age in primary schools has dropped. The fresh round of cuts will do little to remedy that. If we end up with disenchanted, harassed and undermined teachers, and with even less one-to-one contact with children most in need, the graph will continue to plummet.
It may not be popular with Conservative Members to say so, but the settlement is an unwarranted imposition on teachers and it must be set in the context of other cuts in education, including £20 million from school effectiveness grants and £13 million from the planned inspection budget. As my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) said earlier, the reading recovery programme has been scrapped. Discretionary grants are all but a thing of the past. The youth and community service has been decimated. For example, a delegation from Shropshire could not get a hearing from Conservative Members, so it came to see me in Liverpool about 15 mainly rural youth and community projects that were being scrapped in the face of cuts imposed by the Government. Nor are Labour authorities left out: Wigan district council has been forced to dismember its youth and community provision, and to subsume it into leisure services to have any hope of providing any service for some of the more alienated sections of our community—the young and the disadvantaged. The sorry tale goes and on, but I must comment on some of the speeches that were made earlier.
The hon. Member for Gravesham (Mr. Arnold) made a disgraceful attack on Kent county council. He was joined by the hon. Member for Dartford (Mr. Dunn), who in interventions made laudatory remarks about grant-maintained schools. He talked about the waste of money that had been perpetrated by Kent county council. I also had a delegation from his constituency. It came to see me because four schools in his constituency, two of which went grant maintained, were sharing the same playing fields. According to the parents, they could not interest the hon. Gentleman because one of the GM schools had managed to separate off six out of the eight football pitches and to put up a huge fence. While that was going on, the hon. Gentleman sat on the fence—although I hope that he did not literally sit on the fence that the school put around the playing fields as it has been topped by razor wire. That is the sort of education in the community that the Conservative party cares for.
I appreciate the pressures of time, but I should like to mention the attack by a series of Conservative Members, mainly in interventions, on Lancashire county council. They failed to point out two important facts: first, Lancashire has a £2 million shortfall in the forthcoming year; secondly, the cuts in the standard spending assessment per pupil next year mean expenditure cuts of 2.6 per cent. for primary school pupils and 7 per cent. for secondary school pupils. You can go back and explain that to your constituents: those cuts are not down to Lancashire authority—they lie entirely at the door of your own Government.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. I remind the hon. Gentleman that he must address the Chair.

Mr. Kilfoyle: I apologise, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Mr. Mans: rose—

Mr. Kilfoyle: I must finish my speech.
The hon. Member for West Derbyshire behaved disgracefully in attacking a neutral civil servant, the chief education officer of Liverpool city council who, so far as I am aware, is a member of no political party, does not live in the city of Liverpool and sends his fourth child to the local school, which is not in Liverpool, but in the constituency of the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. I believe that that officer's local school is grant maintained. For him to be attacked in the Chamber as an extension of the Labour party is disgraceful.
The hon. Member for West Derbyshire also made a facetious comment about school dinners and pointed in my direction. I am the first to admit that I enjoyed school dinners so much that I used to go for more in the holidays. The reason was simple: when I was a child, local authorities could provide deprived families with school dinners in the holidays. Now local authorities cannot even provide school dinners for kids in need in the towns and countryside of this once great nation. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will take that on board.
I urge hon. Members to support our motion.

The Minister of State, Department for Education (Mr. Eric Forth): From time to time, the debate has been informative, but the main thing of which the House has been informed is how few Opposition Members have bothered to turn up for their own debate on a subject that they claim is important to them. I have been watching throughout the debate, and I have counted as few as two or three, to often as many as six or seven Opposition Back Benchers in attendance. That illustrates something about their motivation.
That also demonstrates the confusion of thought among Opposition Members. I shall take one example. I made a careful note of the words of the hon. Member for Barnsley, West and Penistone (Mr. Clapham)—I made a note of the few words of Opposition Members that I thought were worth while. His words, however, were instructive. He opened his remarks by saying, "Standards in the maintained education sector have fallen." He followed that a few minutes later by saying, "Things have been steadily improving in Barnsley schools." The hon. Gentleman cannot have it both ways. He should either join us in taking pride in the improvements that have taken place in education consistently in the past several years, or he should maintain the opposite view. He cannot have both views.

Mr. Clapham: rose—

Mr. Forth: He will now try to square the circle.

Mr. Clapham: The point that I clearly made, and that the Minister should take on board, is that the siphoning off of resources for the private sector clearly leaves Barnsley having to make up the shortfall because of a lack of funding from the Government.

Mr. Forth: The hon. Gentleman neatly makes the other point that I wanted to make about the debate. He


epitomises the confusion that exists among Opposition Members about the connection between spending and educational quality. However one considers education, whether in relation to the results in our much-welcomed performance tables, to expenditure per pupil in different authorities, to class sizes or to any other measure, no demonstrable connection exists between money in and quality of education out, or between class sizes and quality of education.
The real determinants of the quality of education in this country, as elsewhere in the world, is the quality of teaching, what happens in the classroom and the degree of parental support. It is not simply about money, which Opposition Members seem unable to grasp.

Mr. Blunkett: In that case, why is the money spent by parents on private day education twice as much as the money made available for the equivalent education in the average state school?

Mr. Forth: I have always defended the absolute right of parents to exercise their choice in sending their children to schools. I personally chose to send my children to state schools. I was happy to do so and I believe they received a good education, but I equally welcome those of my hon. Friends, colleagues and others outside who make the personal decision to send their children to private schools, for whatever reason. It is their decision and their choice.
We have confusion among Opposition Members. The proportion of primary pupils in classes of more than 30 has fallen from 26.5 per cent. in 1979 to 23.2 per cent. now. The proportion of secondary pupils in such classes has fallen from 9.9 per cent. in 1979 to 5.3 per cent. now. Many of my hon. Friends have quoted the figures about real expenditure in education since 1979. We take 1979 as our starting point because that is the last time Opposition Members were in Government. That is the only way in which we can judge their real commitment to education. On any indicator one may choose, things are significantly better now than they were in 1979.

Mr. Don Foster: If there is no connection between "cash in and performance out", why has the Secretary of State urged her Cabinet colleagues to give more money to the education service?

Mr. Forth: It is clearly one of the functions of Government Departments to make a perfectly legitimate argument for their expenditure, something that the hon. Gentleman cannot and probably never will understand. It is something normal and natural which occurs every year and throughout Government. For the hon. Gentleman to give it such mystical significance shows that he has missed the point entirely.
The real point of the debate is this: it must be understood that local education authorities have enormous flexibility and freedom in the way in which they can determine their priorities and expenditure within their overall totals.

Mr. Rupert Allason: Does my hon. Friend agree that it might improve the way in which local authorities set their budgets and publish their figures if they declared precisely which items of expenditure related to statutory requirements and which related to non-statutory requirements? At the moment, when

constituents look at local authority education budgets, it is very difficult for them to determine which items of expenditure are required by law and which are the result of good old-fashioned socialism.

Mr. Forth: My hon. Friend raises a very important issue which leads me to my next point.
One decision that authorities must make is how to allocate their expenditure. My hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham (Mr. Arnold) gave us a graphic example of this. He told us that Kent had chosen to increase its education bureaucracy by nearly 200 members of staff. In other words, it increased not the number of people in the classrooms but the number in the county council buildings. My figures also show that in Devon, for example, the number of local authority staff has gone up by some 700; in Oxfordshire, numbers have increased by more than 200; and in Warwickshire by nearly 500. My hon. Friend the Member for Taunton (Mr. Nicholson) told us that in Somerset the number of non-education staff—not teachers—has also gone up by some 500.
It is for local authorities to make such decisions, but they cannot at the same time cry wolf and, having increased the number of bureaucrats, say that they are forced to cut the number of teachers. They cannot have it both ways.
I now cite other recent examples, culled at random from newspapers, about priority spending decisions made by authorities across the country. The Birmingham Evening Mail of 3 February carried an article with the headline "City Row On Hyatt Takeover". It stated:
City Labour leaders want to buy a majority stake in Birmingham's luxury Hyatt Hotel".
That seems to be the sort of priority adopted by one local education authority. It is also reported:
Birmingham schools were accused last year by the National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers of hoarding £17 million in their combined reserves.
One school in Erdington was said to have had a surplus of more than £400,000 stashed away.
The Manchester Evening News stated:
Schools in Salford are under threat from huge cuts despite the council having a staggering £13.5m in reserves … Some members of the ruling Labour group believe the surplus should now be used instead of making devastating savings in town hall departments.
However, it is not all bad news. Also in the ever-instructive Manchester Evening News, but on 24 January, I found a good news story entitled "Hard-up heads' £1 million lift". The article states:
Hard-up headmasters in Oldham are likely to get a surprise £1 million boost for the coming year.
The increase will be recommended to a meeting by the education committee next month by chairman Coun David Jones.
That illustrates a different point. If authorities choose to make such priority decisions, it proves that many could increase the money spent on education if they had made sensible use of their balances and decided to give education sufficient priority.
However, it is not only authorities that can make such priority decisions. Schools also have the same degree of flexibility. Thanks to delegated budgets and the local management of schools, which were eventually praised by


many opposition Members, schools have the capacity to order their priorities and make their own spending decisions to a very large extent.

Mr. Dennis Turner: Although the Minister might challenge it, the evidence from the midlands is very different. We have a £70 million deficit; we are going to lose 1,000 teachers; and there is no question but that class sizes will increase. Governors and parents in the west midlands will not accept the Minister's red herrings because they know the reality of the underfunding from which their schools are suffering.

Mr. Forth: The hon. Gentleman is mistaken on a number of points. He has completely forgotten the example of the Hyatt hotel. If one of the Labour-controlled west midlands authorities wants to make that sort of spending decision, it is open to that authority to do so, but it has to account to its electors. The hon. Gentleman should not come to the Chamber and complain about the cuts threatened as a result of that decision.
I have been in the Department for Education long enough to have reached my fourth year of hearing whingeing and cries of wolf. I have heard the story so often that I can repeat it in my sleep. Every year the story is that there will be devastating cuts in the number of teachers. We have yet to see those cuts; every year, the number remains broadly the same across the country.

Mr. Hattersley: If this is all whingeing and cries of wolf, and if there is so much money sloshing around in the system—I see that the Minister nods his head in confirmation—why did the Secretary of State write to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster to say that without an extra £90 million there would be chaos in the education service?

Mr. Forth: Of course, the Secretary of State has to make her case for her Department, as does every other Secretary of State. If the right hon. Gentleman's memory goes back that far, he will probably recall doing the same when he was a Secretary of State, except that at that time, in 1976, cuts were forced on the Labour Government by the International Monetary Fund which led to deep cuts in spending on education, health and the whole spectrum—[Interruption.]

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. The class is getting distinctly unruly. I cannot hear the Minister and I wish to do so.

Mr. Mike O'Brien: On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. You are well aware of the rules governing the making of controversial comments about other hon. Members. It appears that the Minister is saying that the Secretary of State might not have been telling the whole truth when she wrote that letter.

Madam Deputy Speaker: That is not a point of order for me. I heard no such thing.

Mr. Forth: In order to illustrate my point about schools' flexibility in the use of their budgets, I cannot resist quoting The Guardian, which is something that I rarely do. I never read The Guardian so this had to be brought to my attention. On 1 February, it—

Mr. Blunkett: What does the Minister read?

Mr. Forth: For the hon. Gentleman's edification, my principal reading each day is The Sun, which I find universally uplifting. The article in The Guardian read as follows:
Eight women teachers from Picknalls First School, Uttoxeter"—[Interruption.]

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. It is quite impossible for me to hear the Minister. I especially deprecate noises from Front Benchers making it impossible for me to hear what is being said.

Mr. Forth: I shall not be deterred from completing this little quotation. The article states:
Eight women teachers from Picknalls First School, Uttoxeier, spent a day among the Jacuzzis, whirlpools and health lectures of Hoar Cross Hall … and the £250 bill for their visit was paid for by public funds after being approved by their chairman of governors … Staffordshire county council said that it was up to an individual school how it spent its budget on education and training.
The point is that that was a decision made by the school. We may think it bizarre, but, in these allegedly hard-pressed times—we know that there is more than £500 million in school reserves and balances—that was the school's decision. We respect the decisions made by schools in choosing their priorities. We understand that some schools may choose to have higher reserves, while others schools may choose to use their money to adjust and alter classes sizes or pupil-teacher ratios. We understand that and accept and applaud their freedom to make those decisions. We accept that different local education authorities will decide on different priorities, perhaps to invest in hotels or to do other things, but we object when they come along and try to blame the Government for cuts that may or may not have to be made in education. That will not wash.
We have found out today that Opposition Members have failed consistently to understand the nature of education and its funding. I hope that, having listened to the debate, the few Opposition Members who were present earlier and my hon. Friends will, without hesitation, reject the motion and support the amendment in the name of my right hon. Friend.

Question put, That the original words stand part of the Question:—

The House divided: Ayes 260, Noes 295.

Division No. 65]
[7.00 pm


AYES


Abbott, Ms Diane
Bell, Stuart


Ainger, Nick
Benn, Rt Hon Tony


Ainsworth, Robert (Cov'ry NE)
Bennett, Andrew F


Allen, Graham
Benton, Joe


Alton, David
Bermingham, Gerald


Anderson, Donald (Swansea E)
Berry, Roger


Anderson, Ms Janet (Ros'dale)
Betts, Clive


Armstrong, Hilary
Blair, Rt Hon Tony


Ashdown, Rt Hon Paddy
Blunkett, David


Ashton, Joe
Boateng, Paul


Austin-Walker, John
Boyes, Roland


Banks, Tony (Newham NW)
Bradley, Keith


Barnes, Harry
Bray, Dr Jeremy


Banon, Kevin
Brown, Gordon (Dunfermline E)


Battle, John
Brown, N (N'c'tle upon Tyne E)


Bayley, Hugh
Bruce, Malcolm (Gordon)


Beckett, Rt Hon Margaret
Burden, Richard


Beith, Rt Hon A J
Byers, Stephen






Caborn, Richard
Hinchliffe, David


Callaghan, Jim
Hodge, Margaret


Campbell, Mrs Anne (C'bridge)
Hoey, Kate


Campbell, Menzies (Fife NE)
Hogg, Norman (Cumbernauld)


Campbell, Ronnie (Blyth V)
Home Robertson, John


Campbell-Savours, D N
Hoon, Geoffrey


Canavan, Dennis
Howarth, George (Knowsley North)


Cann, Jamie
Howells, Dr. Kim (Pontypridd)


Chidgey, David
Hughes, Robert (Aberdeen N)


Chisholm, Malcolm
Hughes, Roy (Newport E)


Clapham, Michael
Hughes, Simon (Southwark)


Clark, Dr David (South Shields)
Hutton, John


Clarke, Eric (Midlothian)
Illsley, Eric


Clarke, Tom (Monklands W)
Ingram, Adam


Clelland, David
Jackson, Glenda (H'stead)


Clwyd, Mrs Ann
Jackson, Helen (Shef'ld, H)


Coffey, Ann
Jamieson, David


Cohen, Harry
Janner, Greville


Connarty, Michael
Johnston, Sir Russell


Corbett, Robin
Jones, Barry (Alyn and D'side)


Corston, Jean
Jones, Ieuan Wyn (Ynys Mon)


Cousins, Jim
Jones, Lynne (B'ham S 0)


Cox, Tom
Jones, Martyn (Clwyd, SW)


Cunliffe, Lawrence
Jones, Nigel (Cheltenham)


Cunningham, Jim (Covy SE)
Jowell, Tessa


Dalyell, Tam
Kaufman, Rt Hon Gerald


Darling, Alistair
Keen, Alan


Davies, Bryan (Oldham C'tral)
Kennedy, Charles (Ross,C&S)


Davies, Rt Hon Denzil (Lianelli)
Kennedy, Jane (Lpool Brdgn)


Davies, Ron (Caerphilly)
Khabra, Piara S


Davis, Terry (B'ham, H'dge H'I)
Kilfoyle, Peter


Denham, John
Kirkwood, Archy


Dewar, Donald
Lestor, Joan (Eccles)


Dixon, Don
Lewis, Terry


Dobson, Frank
Liddell, Mrs Helen


Donohoe, Brian H
Litherland, Robert


Dowd, Jim
Livingstone, Ken


Durnnachie, Jimmy
Lloyd, Tony (Stretford)


Dunwoody, Mrs Gwyneth
Llwyd, Elfyn


Eagle, Ms Angela
Loyden, Eddie


Eastham, Ken
Lynne, Ms Liz


Enright, Derek
McAllion, John


Etherington, Bil
McAvoy, Thomas


Evans, John (St Helens N)
McCartney, Ian


Fatchett Derek
Macdonald, Calum


Field, Frank (Birkenhead)
McFall,John


Fisher, Mark
McKelvey, William


Flynn, Paul
Mackinlay, Andrew


Foster, Rt Hon Derek
Maclennan, Robert


Foster, Don (Bath)
McMaster, Gordon


Fraser.John
McNamara, Kevin


Fyfe, Maria
MacShane, Denis


Galbraith, Sam
McWilliam, John


Galloway, George
Madden, Max


Gapes, Mike
Maddock, Diana


George, Bruce
Mahon, Alice


Gerrard, Neil
Mandelson, Peter


Gilbert, Rt Hon Dr John
Marek, Dr John


Godman, Dr Norman A
Marshall, David (Shettleston)


Godsiff, Roger
Marshall, Jim (Leicester, S)


Golding, Mrs Llin
Martin, Michael J (Springburn)


Gordon, Mildred
Marttew, Eric


Grant, Bernie (Tottenham)
Maxton, John


Griffiths, Nigel (Edinburgh S)
Meacher, Michael


Griffiths, Win (Bridgend)
Meale, Alan


Grocott, Bruce
Michael, Alun


Gunnel, John
Michie, Bill (Sheffield Heeley)


Hall, Mike
Michie, Mrs Ray (Argyll & Bute)


Hanson, David
Milburn, Alan


Hardy, Peter
Miller, Andrew


Harman, Ms Harriet
Mitchell, Austin (Gt Grimsby)


Harvey, Nick
Moonie, Dr Lewis


Hattersley, Rt Hon Roy
Morris, Rt Hon Alfred (Wy'nshawe)


Henderson, Doug
Morris, Estelle (B'ham Yardley)


Heppell, John
Morris, Rt Hon John (Aberavon)


Hill, Keith (Streatham)
Mudie, George





Mulin, Chris
Skinner, Dennis


Oakes,Rt Hon Gordon
Smith, Andrew (Oxford E)


O'Brien, Mike (N W'kshire)
Smith, Chris (Isl'ton S & F'sbury)


Olner, Bil
Smith, Llew (Blaenau Gwent)


O'Nill, Martin
Smyth, The Reverend Martin


Orme, Rt Hon Stanley
Snape, Peter


Parry, Robert
Soley.Clive


Patchett, Terry
Steel, Rt Hon Sir David


Pearson, Ian
Steinberg, Gerry


Pendry, Tom
Stevenson, George


Pickthall, Colin
Stott, Roger


Pike, Peter L
Strang, Dr. Gavin


Pope, Greg
Straw, Jack


Powell, Ray (Ogmore)
Sutcliffe, Gerry


Prentice, Bridget (Lew'm E)
Taylor, Mrs Ann (Dewsbury)


Prentice, Gordon (Pendle)
Taylor, Matthew (Truro)


Prescott, Rt Hon John
Thompson, Jack (Wansbeck)


Primarolo, Dawn
Timms, Stephen


Quin, Ms Joyce
Tipping, Paddy


Raynsford, Nick
Tyler, Paul


Redmond, Martin
Vaz, Keith


Reid, Dr John
Walker, Rt Hon Sir Harold


Rendel, David
Wallace, James


Robertson, George (Hamilton)
Walley.Joan


Robinson, Geoffrey (Co'try NW)
Wardel, Gareth (Gower)


Roche, Mrs Barbara
Wareing, Robert N


Rogers, Allan
Wicks, Malcolm


Rooker, Jeff
Wigley, Dafydd


Rooney, Terry
Wiliams, Alan W (Carmarthen)


Ross, Ernie (Dundee W)
Wiliams, Rt Hon Alan (Sw'n W)


Rowlands, Ted
Wilson, Brian


Ruddock, Joan
Worthington, Tony


Sedgemore, Brian
Wray, Jimmy


Sheerman, Barry
Young, David (Bolton SE)


Sheldon, Rt Hon Robert



Shore, Rt Hon Peter
Tellers for the Ayes:


Short Clare
Mr John Cummings and Mr. Dennis Turner.


Simpson, Alan





NOES


Ainsworth, Peter (East Surrey)
Brown, M (Brigg & Cl'thorpes)


Aitken, Rt Hon Jonathan
Browning, Mrs Angela


Alexander, Richard
Bruce, Ian (Dorset)


Alison, Rt Hon Michael (Selby)
Budgen, Nicholas


Allason, Rupert (Torbay)
Burns, Simon


Amess, David
Burt, Alistair


Ancram, Michael
Butcher, John


Arbuthnot, James
Butler, Peter


Arnold, Jacques (Gravesham)
Butterfill, John


Arnold, Sir Thomas (Hazel Grv)
Carlisle, John (Luton North)


Ashby, David
Carlisle, Sir Kenneth (Lincoln)


Atkins, Robert
Carrington, Matthew


Atkinson, David (Bour'mouth E)
Carttiss, Michael


Atkinson, Peter (Hexham)
Cash, William


Baker, Nicholas (North Dorset)
Channon, Rt Hon Paul


Baldly, Tony
Chapman, Sydney


Banks, Matthew (Southport)
Churchill, Mr


Banks, Robert (Harrogate)
Clappison, James


Bates, Michael
Clark, Dr Michael (Rochford)


Batiste, Spencer
Clarke, Rt Hon Kenneth (Ru'clif)


Bellingham, Henry
Clifton-Brown, Geoffrey


Bendall, Vivian
Cotvin, Michael


Beresford, Sir Paul
Congdon, David


Body, Sir Richard
Conway, Derek


Bonsor, Sir Nicholas
Coombs, Anthony (Wyre For'st)


Booth, Hartley
Coombs, Simon (Swindon)


Boswel, Tim
Cope, Rt Hon Sir John


Bottomley, Peter (Eltham)
Couchman, James


Bottomley, Rt Hon Virginia
Cran, James


Bowden, Sir Andrew
Currie, Mrs Edwina (S D'by'ire)


Bowis, John
Curry, David (Skipton & Ripon)


Boyson, Rt Hon Sir Rhodes
Davies, Quentin (Stamford)


Brandreth, Gyles
Davis, David (Boothferry)


Brazier, Julian
Day, Stephen


Bright, Sir Graham
Deva, Nirj Joseph


Brooke, Rt Hon Peter
Dicks, Terry






Dorrel, Rt Hon Stephen
Kilfedder, Sir James


Douglas-Hamitton, Lord James
King, Rt Hon Tom


Dover, Den
Kirkhope, Timothy


Duncan, Alan
Knapman, Roger


Duncan Smith, Iain
Knight, Mrs Angela (Ere'wash)


Dunn, Bob
Knight, Greg (Derby N)


Durant, Sir Anthony
Knight, Dame Jill (Bir'm E'st'n)


Elletson, Harold
Knox, Sir David


Emery, Rt Hon Sir Peter
Kynoch, George (Kincardine)


Evans, David (Welwyn Hatfield)
Lait, Mrs Jacqui


Evans, Jonathan (Brecon)
Lamont Rt Hon Norman


Evans, Nigel (Ribble Valey)
Lang, Rt Hon Ian


Evans, Roger (Monmouth)
Lawrence, Sir Ivan


Evennett, David
Legg, Barry


Faber, David
Leigh, Edward


Fabricant, Michael
Lemox-Boyd, Sir Mark


Fenner, Dame Peggy
Lester, Jim (Broxtowe)


Field, Barry (Isle of Wight)
Lidington, David


Fishburn, Dudley
Lord, Michael


Forman, Nigel
Luff, Peter


Forth, Eric
Lyell, Rt Hon Sir Nicholas


Fowler, Rt Hon Sir Norman
MacGregor, Rt Hon John


Fox, Dr Liam (Woodspring)
MacKay, Andrew


Fox, Sir Marcus (Shipley)
Maclean, David


Freeman, Rt Hon Roger
McLoughlin, Patrick


French, Douglas
McNair-Wilson, Sir Patrick


Gale, Roger
Maitland, LadyOlga


Gallie, Phil
Major, Rt Hon John


Garel-Jones, Rt Hon Tristan
Malone, Gerald


Garnier, Edward
Mans, Keith


Gill, Christopher
Marland, Paul


Gillan, Cheryl
Marshall, John (Hendon S)


Goodlad, Rt Hon Alastair
Marshall, Sir Michael (Arundel)


Goodson-Wickes, Dr Charles
Martin, David (Portsmouth S)


Gorman, Mrs Teresa
Mates, Michael


Gorst, Sir John
Mawhinney, Rt Hon Dr Brian


Grant, Sir A (SW Cambs)
Mellor, Rt Hon David


Greenway, Harry (Ealing N)
Merchant Piers


Greenway, John (Ryedale)
Mills, Iain


Griffiths, Peter (Portsmouth, N)
Mitchell, Andrew (Geding)


Grylls, Sir Michael
Mitchell, Sir David (NW Hants)


Gummer, Rt Hon John Selwyn
Moate, Sir Roger


Hague, William
Monro, Sir Hector


Hamilton, Rt Hon Sir Archibald
Montgomery, Sir Fergus


Hamilton, Neil (Tatton)
Nelson, Anthony


Hampson, Dr Keith
Neubert, Sir Michael


Hanley, Rt Hon Jeremy
Newton, Rt Hon Tony


Hamam, Sir John
Nichols, Patrick


Hargreaves, Andrew
Nichollson, David (Taunton)


Hawkins, Nick
Nicholson, Emma (Devon West)


Hawksley, Warren
Norris, Steve


Hayes, Jerry
Onslow, Rt Hon Sir Cranley


Heald, Oliver
Oppenheim, Phillip


Heath, Rt Hon Sir Edward
Ottaway, Richard


Heathcoat-Amory, David
Page, Richard


Hendry, Charles
Paice, James


Higgins, Rt Hon Sir Terence
Patrick, Sir Irvine


Hill, James (Southampton Test)
Patten, Rt Hon John


Horam, John
Pattie.Rt Hon Sir Geoffrey


Hordem, Rt Hon Sir Peter
Pawsey, James


Howen, Rt Hon David (G'dford)
Peacock, Mrs Elizabeth


Howell, Sir Ralph (N Norfolk)
Pickles, Eric


Hughes, Robert G (Harrow W)
Porter, Barry (Wirral S)


Hunt, Rt Hon David (Wirral W)
Porter, David (Waveney)


Hunt, Sir John (Ravensbourne)
Portillo, Rt Hon Michael


Hunter, Andrew
Powell, William (Corby)


Jack, Michael
Rathbone, Tim


Jackson, Robert (Wantage)
Redwood, Rt Hon John


Jenkin, Bernard
Renton, Rt Hon Tim


Jessel, Toby
Richards, Rod


Johnson Smilh, Sir Geoffrey
Riddick, Graham


Jones, Gwilym (Cardiff, North)
Rifkind, Rt Hon Malcolm


Jones, Robert B (W Hertfdshr)
Robathan, Andrew


Jopling, Rt Hon Michael
Roberts, Rt Hon Sir Wyn


Kellett-Bowman, Dame Elaine
Robertson, Raymond (Ab'd'n S)


Key, Robert
Robinson, Mark (Somerton)





Roe, Mrs Marion (Broxbourne)
Temple-Morris, Peter


Rowe, Andrew (Mid Kent)
Thomason, Roy


Rumbold, Rt Hon Dame Angela
Thompson, Sir Donald (C'er V)


Ryder, Rt Hon Richard
Thompson, Patrick (Norwich N)


Sackville, Tom
Thurnham, Peter


Sainsbury, Rt Hon Sir Timothy
Townend, John (Bridlington)


Scott, Rt Hon Sir Nicholas
Townsend, Cyril D (Bexl'yh'th)


Shaw, David (Dover)
Tracey, Richard


Shaw, Sir Giles (Pudsey)
Tredinnick, David


Shephard, Rt Hon Gillian
Trend, Michael


Shepherd, Colin (Hereford)
Trotter, Nevile


Shepherd, Richard (Adridge)
Twinn, Dr Ian


Shersby, Michael
Vaughan, Sir Gerard


Sims, Roger
Viggers, Peter


Skeet Sir Trevor
Waldegrave, Rt Hon William


Smith, Sir Dudley (Warwick)
Walker, Bit (N Tayside)


Smith, Tim (Beaconsfield)
Waller, Gary


Soames, Nicholas
Ward, John


Speed, Sir Keith
Wardle, Charles (Bexhill)


Spencer, Sir Derek
Waterson, Nigel


Spicer Sir James (W Dorset)
Watts, John


Spicer, Michael (S worcs)
Whitney, Ray


Spring, Richard
Whittingdale, John


Sproat, Iain
Widdecombe, Ann



Wiggin, Sir Jerry


Squire, Robin (Homcnurch)
Wilkinson, John


Stanley, Rt Hon Sir John
Willetts, David


Steen, Anthony
Wilshire, David


Stephen, Michael
Winterton, Mrs Ann (Congleton)


Stern, Michael
Winterton, Nicholas (Macc'fld)


Stewart, Allan
Wolfson, Mark


Streeter, Gary
Wood, Timothy


Sumberg, David
Yeo, Tim


Sweeney, Walter
Young, Rt Hon Sir George


Tapsell, Sir Peter



Taylor, Ian (Esher)
Tellers for the Noes:


Taylor, John M (Solihull)
Mr. Bowen Wells and Mr. David Lightbown.


Taylor, Sir Teddy (Southend, E)

Question accordingly negatived.

Question, That the proposed words be there added, put forthwith pursuant to Standing Order No. 30 (Questions on amendments) and agreed to.

MADAM DEPUTY SPEAKER forthwith declared the main Question, as amended, to be agreed to.

Resolved,
That this House welcomes the substantial increase in the real level of education spending since 1979; applauds Government policies to raise standards in schools; acknowledges that this year's settlement is necessarily tough but congratulates teachers and governing bodies for meeting the challenge of education reform; and recognises that parents will judge schools above all by the performance of pupils and the quality of teaching and learning.

Passenger Services under Rail Privatisation

Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Janet Fookes): Before we start the debate I remind the House that there will be a continued limit of 10 minutes on Back-Bench speeches, and that Madam Speaker has selected the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister.

Mr. Michael Meacher: I beg to move,
That this House calls on the Government to fulfil its repeated promises that Passenger Train Services would only be franchised on the basis of current time tables.
I am sure that I have the House with me when I send our condolences to my hon. Friend the Member for Fife, Central (Mr. McLeish), who would normally have wound up the debate tonight.

The Secretary of State for Transport (Dr. Brian Mawhinney): The Government side of the House wishes to be associated with those condolences.

Mr. Meacher: I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for saying that, and I am sure that he shares our concern and our feeling for my hon. Friend at this time.
This is the second major debate on the consequences of rail privatisation, and if the Government continue with their trail of broken promises on how services will be improved, I do not think that it will be the last. Until now, the Government's position on the franchising of passenger services has at least had the merit of being clear and unequivocal.
In the Committee that considered the Bill that became the Railways Act 1993, Ministers fell over themselves to state, and then to reiterate, that franchising would be based on the existing level of service. On Second Reading, the then Minister for Public Transport, now the Minister of State for Defence Procurement, who was to take the Bill through Committee, said unambiguously:
I wish to make it absolutely clear that we intend the franchising director, when he is appointed, to start franchising with the existing timetable and existing services.
The then Secretary of State had earlier said the same, telling the House:
we expect the franchises—indeed, it will be the case—to be on the basis of the present timetable".—[Official Report, 2 February 1993; Vol. 218, c. 159–244.]
Those are not isolated references. So far I have counted at least 17 occasions, either in the House or in another place, on which Ministers gave assurances in terms that the franchises would be based on the current timetables and the existing level of services.
A week ago, the franchising director produced his first set of service specifications for four of the franchises. As the House well knows, the minimum standards set represent a cut of about 20 per cent. below the level of existing services overall and a cut of about 45 per cent. for the Gatwick Express.
The most significant aspect of those extensive cuts in minimum standards is the fact that, unlike the Rail Regulator, over whom the Secretary of State has no control, the franchising director is, in the words of the Minister in Committee, a "creature" of the Secretary of

State. So to that extent it is clear that the Secretary of State knew about, and assented to, those minimum standards. In any case, his fixing of the franchising director's budget means that he has indirect control over how far cuts are enforced and to what extent improvements are allowed for. The Secretary of State is therefore charged with flatly breaking every ministerial promise that the base for franchising would be the current timetable. There is nothing particularly remarkable in that—it is his stock-in-trade. Indeed, given the right hon. Gentleman's record, one might say that he rates as a serial promise-breaker.
The Secretary of State's predecessor promised that through-ticketing stations would be fully maintained; this Secretary of State is set to cut them by 80 per cent. His predecessor promised that tickets would be fully inter-available between lines run by different train operators; this Secretary of State is presiding over the crumbling of that facility. His predecessor promised that there would be no investment hiatus due to privatisation; last year, under this Secretary of State, no new orders were issued for rolling stock for the first time since the war. His predecessor said after Lockerbie that airport security would be stepped up and that money was not an issue, and this Secretary of State told the House a week ago that he took channel tunnel security very seriously. We now know that, only four days previously, he had authorised a cut of 30 per cent. in the security division of his Department.
The right hon. Gentleman's predecessor promised repeatedly in 1993–94 that Railtrack would remain in the public sector for the foreseeable future; this Secretary of State has offered it for sale first, simply to provide money for tax cuts at the next election. The Secretary of State gave a clear understanding to Asea and Brown Boveri that it would get a follow-on order for 40 additional Networker trains for the Kent services. Yesterday, the right hon. Gentleman peremptorily cancelled that order, and put 750 jobs and the very survival of the carriage works at York at risk.
The Secretary of State will say anything, promise anything and give any commitment, so long as he is not required to deliver. Can anyone believe a word that the right hon. Gentleman says? He has raised used-car salesmanship to a new art form. Reading the small print simply is not enough. It is not so much a case of "read my lips" as take every statement that he makes with a pinch of salt. However, like all persistent delinquents, this old lag has a string of excuses as long as your arm.

Mr. Anthony Steen: On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Do you feel that the hon. Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Meacher) is using parliamentary language with regard to the Secretary of State? I suggest that he should retract what he has said.

Madam Deputy Speaker: I presumed that the hon. Gentleman's words were said with a certain lightness of touch. If that were so, I think what he said was acceptable. If it were put in a different way or with a different tone, I might take a different view.

Mr. Meacher: I am grateful, Madam Deputy Speaker. My remarks were meant in that vein, and I am glad that you saw it that way.


We have heard a string of excuses, most of which have been trotted out tonight in the Government's amendment. The first excuse in the amendment is that the franchising director's report
for the first time, introduces guarantees of service for passengers".
That simply is not true. British Rail has been contracted for many years to provide services as a condition of its public service obligation grant, in accordance with the 1988 timetable.

Mr. Gyles Brandreth: The hon. Gentleman is speaking about guarantees of service. Could he be specific about the guarantees that he would provide in terms of service timetabling? Is he providing a guarantee that he would renationalise the railways in due course? He spoke about cuts in investment. What investment would the hon. Gentleman like to see?

Mr. Meacher: We were content with the contractual arrangements that have existed with British Rail. I have repeatedly made it clear that we believe in increased investment in the rail infrastructure by comparison with that of the present Government. If increased investment in the channel tunnel is stripped out, investment in the rest of the network has steadily deteriorated year after year. We would never have allowed that to happen.
The next excuse is a real old offender's gambit. The Government amendment
supports the Government in its determination not to freeze the existing timetable".
Of course, no one ever asked for that. We were demanding that there should not be cuts, and that existing services should be the basis on which to build improvements.

Mr. Nick Hawkins: Does the hon. Gentleman appreciate that the whole purpose of bringing in the private sector is precisely to allow the private sector to offer more services than are offered by the current timetable? Opposition Members do not understand the private sector because almost none of them has any experience of it, and they do not realise that the whole basis of the scheme is to improve customer services by increasing services beyond the current timetable.

Mr. Meacher: The hon. Gentleman should perhaps contain himself. If he really believes that, frankly he will believe anything. I would simply say to him that if, as he believes, the private sector will restore the current level of services, why has not the Secretary of State guaranteed it in the first place as a basis for the franchises?
Another excuse is rolled out in the Government amendment, which makes the same point as the hon. Member for Blackpool, South (Mr. Hawkins). The amendment states that the Government are determined to
create space for the private sector to develop new and additional services".
Frankly, that is pure fantasy. I do not deny that, in some cases, there may be some improvement on the reduced standards, but surely the key point is that private operators cannot be made to produce those improvements in any case at all. If the right hon. Gentleman seriously believes that existing service levels will be restored, what is the point in reducing standards by 20 per cent. in the first place?
Never at a loss for another wheeze, the Secretary of State advanced another non-sequitur this week. He said that there would be no problem in keeping to the current

timetables, because the shadow franchise operators had assured him that they would continue to run the existing level of services and improve on it. Surely even the right hon. Gentleman can see that that is a pointless claim. The shadow franchise operators are still subsidiaries of British Rail and they have a sense of public service. The question is not what will happen when the services are run by British Rail, but what will happen when they are run by private operators who are guided purely by commercial self-interest. The Secretary of State ought to address himself to that.
We now come to the biggest whopper from the Secretary of State in his vain attempt to defend the indefensible. The Government amendment states said proposals will
develop new and additional services based on current timetables"—
that is patently not true
which are more attuned to the needs of passengers".
That claim simply does not stand up to examination, and I shall explain why.
Great Western Railways is one of the flagship franchises being offered for sale. On the London to Cardiff run in 1979, there were 26 trains per day, with a mean journey time of 1 hour 43 minutes. This year, there are 19 trains per day, with a mean journey time of exactly two hours. Under the passenger service requirement, the franchising director—for which read the Government—is proposing a minimum of 12 trains a day, with a mean journey time of 2 hours 5 minutes. Is that attuned to the needs of passengers?
That is not an exceptional case, and in fact it is typical of the timetables that are now being proposed. Let us take, for example, the London to Plymouth run. In 1981, there were 16 trains a day, with a first arrival from London at 10.49 am. This year, there are 12 trains a day, with a first arrival from London at 11.21 am. Under the passenger service requirements, the Government now propose a minimum of nine trains a day, the first of which will arrive from London by 12 noon. Is that
more attuned to the needs of passengers"?

Mr. Robert Key: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Meacher: I hope that hon. Gentleman will answer my question, because it was addressed to the Secretary of State. Do Conservative Members believe that those substantial cuts are
attuned to the needs of passengers",

Mr. Key: The answer is probably yes, because in the days when I lived down in that part of the world there was no motorway to London, nor an airline operating a daily service to Heathrow. So that probably was the pattern of service on the railway. It may well be
attuned to the needs of passengers",
but we need privatisation to take much more account of present-day needs, instead of British Rail running a railway to suit itself.

Mr. Meacher: If the hon. Gentleman thinks that significant cuts on the rail system can simply be justified by saying that there has been an upgrading of the roads and an improvement in air travel, I suggest that he tries to


convince his constituents, who I believe will be extremely angry when they realise the extensive cuts involved in that passenger service requirement.

Mr. Hawkins: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Meacher: No, I shall not give way again to the hon. Gentleman.
Exactly the same picture emerges, whatever the major line, such as the London to Penzance line or the important service from Newbury to London. Furthermore, an important point that has not been brought out is the fact that the Great Western passenger service requirements link all major stations to London but not to each other. It would therefore be perfectly possible, apart from in peak hours, to meet the specification laid down with no service between Bristol Parkway and Swindon, and no service between Swindon and Reading. Is that
more attuned to the needs of passengers"?
The Secretary of State does not offer a response because the answer is clear. I shall address my next remarks to the Minister for Railways and Roads. Perhaps the person who drew up the Great Western passenger service requirement believes that Sir John Betjeman's "friendly bombs" have already dropped on Slough. For, according to the specification, despite the fact that it has four InterCity services, it needs none in future. Is that
more attuned to the needs of
the electorate of Slough? They must wonder what is the point of having a Minister for Railways and Roads to represent the constituency if he cannot even get the trains to stop at his station.

Mr. Peter Snape: Now that the Minister has his present job, perhaps he does not need a train anyway.

Mr. Meacher: Perhaps he needs a one-way ticket, and it may not be long before he gets one.
The passenger service requirement is supposed to protect services, yet it cuts the very services that are least viable. In those, I include the limited Slough stops, as well as extensions to the Carmarthen route once a day, and the Fishguard boat-trains, for example. Those are being omitted, leaving only the "fat" services protected. The changes will be attuned not to the needs of passengers but to the profits of commercial operators. The cavalier disregard of passengers' needs is summed up—there are many examples of it—by the Dawlish specification, which says that it must have
at least 1 train a day, departing London at or after 9.45 am and arriving Dawlish at or before 8 pm.

Mr. Andrew Mackinlay: Perhaps it goes via Peterborough.

Mr. Meacher: I did not check on that, but it may be compatible to go via Peterborough. As the journey time is well under three hours, that allows departure from London at any time from 9.45 am to 5 pm, so the poor Dawlish residents will have no say on whether their one train suits their day-travel market or simply the needs of those visiting Dawlish from London.
Curiously, the South West Trains passenger service requirement is exactly the opposite. I wonder how that comes about. It is over-precise rather than vague, but is

still not to the advantage of passengers. For instance, on the London to Weymouth line, a faster train is specified every hour to Weymouth but with higher frequencies at main stops and protected frequencies at smaller places. I understand from those operating the service that the trouble is that because the passenger service requirement spells out that the fast train to Weymouth must stop at all those stations, thereby preventing the service from being speeded up, and because the passenger service requirement does not allow those smaller stations to be served by restored local train services, the franchising director specification does not allow for—indeed, it prevents—any improvement. Is that
attuned to the needs of passengers"?
This is only the start of the cuts that privatisation will bring. The passenger service requirements that we are debating exclude any Great Western InterCity services west of Swansea, any through services from Swansea via Winchester to Reading, despite the fact that the journey goes through eight Tory constituencies—I wonder what the effect will be there—and any 15-minute service, as at present, on the Gatwick Express. Indeed, they exclude any service whatever from Gatwick after 7 pm. That is only the beginning. Today we have seen the scalpel; in future, we shall certainly see the axe as the Motorail service is chopped, sleeper services to Fort William are ended, and off-peak, late-night, early-morning and weekend services are eroded everywhere.
Moreover, the wording of the Secretary of State's objectives, instructions and guidance document for the franchising directors is as ominous as it is clear. Paragraph 18 says:
For the initial letting of franchises, your specification of minimum service levels for railway passenger services is to be based on that being provided by BR immediately prior to franchising".
If what we have seen today is supposed to be based on current timetables, what cuts will future lettings of franchises open up?
Those passenger service requirements are not a step towards improving services for passengers; they are a step towards protecting the commercially most profitable routes in order to make franchises that nobody wants to buy just a bit more saleable. It is a policy driven by dogma, fuelled by endless broken promises and marked by almost universal opposition in the country. If it continues to be pursued, we shall ensure that it plays a major role in bringing about the Government's downfall.

The Secretary of State for Transport (Dr. Brian Mawhinney): I beg to move, to leave out from "House" to the end of the Question and to add instead thereof:
welcomes the Franchising Director's consultation document on Passenger Service Requirements which, for the first time, introduces guarantees of service for passengers; supports the Government in its determination not to freeze the existing timetable but to create space for the private sector to develop new and additional services based on current timetables which are more attuned to the needs of passengers; supports the Government in its determination to halt the decline in railway use by both passengers and freight customers; and condemns Her Majesty's Opposition for continuing to rely on scare tactics as a substitute for a policy which would enhance passenger services.
In all my years in the House, I have never before been accused of being a systematic liar. Perhaps, Madam Deputy Speaker, you will not allow me to use that word, even about myself. So perhaps I should say a systematic


purveyor of terminological inexactitudes. Taken from the hon. Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Meacher), it is a privilege and honour that I shall cherish, particularly in the light of the speech that he has just made. His talking about "cuts" demonstrates that he has not the beginning of an understanding of the privatisation process. He talked about new timetables being proposed, when on no occasion did the franchising director mention—much less propose—a timetable. As for Cardiff, in case he wants an argument I have the proof before me to show that he was factually wrong on both counts. Interestingly, the word "consultation", which is what the franchising director is about, including statutory consultations with rail users' committees and local authorities, never passed the hon. Gentleman's lips. If, in those terms, I am a purveyor of terminological inexactitudes, I am delighted to be so labelled by the hon. Member for Oldham, West. Let us now get on with the debate.
Since 1948, when it was nationalised, British Rail has invested £54 billion in the network only to see its share of passenger travel slashed from 17 per cent. to just 5 per cent. During that time BR has had almost unlimited freedom to alter services with little or no reference to the passenger and too often to the disadvantage of those who pay.
Unlike the Labour party, I am determined to reverse that sad decline and to see our railways revitalised; delivering the services that the passenger wants rather than what the network chooses to provide.
We can do this only by changing BR's bureaucratic, nationalised structure—by providing private finance, investment and management skills; and, especially, the private sector's sensitivity to the customer. I realise that that is an unfortunate fact that the hon. Member for Oldham, West does not like, but those private sector skills, investments and sensitivities have transformed other transport undertakings such as British Airways and the long-distance coach industry. I am confident they will do the same for the railways. The hon. Gentleman has not produced a single argument to suggest otherwise.
Passengers and those who work on the railways should have confidence and pride in the service—secure in the knowledge that private train operators will be tailoring their services to what the traveller wants. Operators have real commercial incentives to do so. I understand why the hon. Member for Oldham, West has difficulty with the concept of the private sector, but let me repeat slowly—perhaps it will help the hon. Gentleman—that operators have a real commercial incentive in tailoring their services to what the traveller wants. Just like other private businesses—from supermarkets to car makers—those operators will want to retain existing customers and attract new ones. The key to doing that is to provide passengers with trains at the time they want to travel.
The stimulus is there. Extra trains may cost operators not much more than the price of the electricity or diesel to power them and the wages of the staff to operate them. That gives a commercially minded railwayman a powerful motive for creating new services and new demand. But if we want a railway which is more responsive to passengers, we need a much clearer way of determining the pattern of passenger services. That is where passenger service requirements come in. For the first time, they will provide a guaranteed level of service for passengers, which operators will be contractually obliged to meet.
I must repeat to the hon. Member for Oldham, West—that I shall keep on doing so until he grasps that salient fact—that PSRs are not timetables. They specify the service pattern that operators will be required to provide in terms of frequency of services, maximum journey times, first and last trains, weekend services and, where appropriate, levels of crowding—all for the first time.
There is no need for PSRs to specify services in detail in the way that they appear in a timetable; indeed to do so would simply fossilise services, making them completely unresponsive to changes in passenger demand. The PSRs that have been announced, however, are based on the existing timetable, exactly as we have always promised. I endorse what the hon. Member for Oldham, West quoted from my predecessor who said:
I have made that clear … we expect the franchises … to be on the basis of the present timetable."—[Official Report, 2 February 1993; Vol. 218, c. 159.]
He did not say that they would be identical to the present timetable, but "on the basis of". I stand by that.
In cases where services are heavily dependent on subsidy—incidentally hon. Members will have noted that the hon. Member for Oldham, West did not mention anything to do with that—that subsidy will continue and PSRs will require the operator to run services which, to all intents and purposes, match the present level of services very closely.
For services which are commercially viable, we can afford to allow the operator greater flexibility to respond to market demands. Even in those cases, the PSR—the guaranteed requirement—for such services takes as a yardstick the services specified in the existing timetable. Moreover the combined effect of the PSR and the commercial incentive can be expected to deliver services that are just as comprehensive as those operated by BR at present—possibly more so.
That is not just wishful thinking. The evidence is there in the track access contracts which the operators have agreed with Railtrack. For each of the four train operating units whose PSRs were announced last week, the access agreements give the operators both sufficient train paths to provide the existing services, and extra paths to provide additional services. The operators could have negotiated those rights only in the expectation that they want to provide services in excess of existing services.
Do not take my word for it. Listen to those operating the services at present. I realise that it is embarrassing for the hon. Member for Oldham, West, but the managing director of South West Trains said:
We firmly believe that the route to success lies in attracting more people to our services and this means more, not less trains. We plan further new services this May.
The managing director of Great Western Trains said:
The current timetable provides more services than the minimum requirement, in line with customer demand and commercial justification. The timetable plan for May 1995 maintains the current level of services and consideration is being given to the introduction of additional ones." 
The managing director of Gatwick Express said:
We … have no plans to reduce our service frequency." 


The managing director of London-Tilbury-Southend line said:
LTS Rail introduced additional off-peak trains in May 1994. No significant changes are envisaged for May 1995. Completion of the £150 million LTS resignalling project in 1996 will provide further opportunities to encourage car users to switch to LTS Rail. We have negotiated a track access contract which provides scope for this.

Mr. Paul Channon: Since my right hon. Friend is talking about the railway line that runs to my constituency and that of the hon. Member for Thurrock (Mr. Mackinlay), does he agree that, in the past 20 years, that line has become famous as the misery line? What is now suggested offers, for once, the hope of resignalling; eventually new rolling stock and a better service with more off-peak and perhaps even peak services. It will therefore offer a better deal to the people of Southend.

Dr. Mawhinney: My right hon. Friend is exactly right. It seems clear to everyone except the Labour party that if British Rail sees opportunities, the private sector will see even more opportunities, because that is its characteristic. The Labour party fails to understand that.

Mr. Meacher: It appears, unfortunately, that the right hon. Gentleman has read out a section of his speech that was prepared before he listened to mine. He has not taken into account my central point that all the managers from whom he has quoted are employees of British Rail. They, of course, have a commitment to expansion and public service. What he must address is the likely attitude of private operators, who are motivated purely by commercial self-interest.

Dr. Mawhinney: Not only did I take that point into consideration, I dismissed it, as I just told my right hon. Friend the Member for Southend, West. The problem with the hon. Member for Oldham, West is that he has no understanding of how the private sector works. It is interested in delivering more services and attracting new customers at marginal cost, because that is at the heart of commercial incentive. That incentive is good for the passengers, good for the operators and, incidentally, good for the taxpayer as well.

Mr. Nick Ainger: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. John Home Robertson: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Dr. Mawhinney: No, I want to make progress. This is a short debate and I will follow the example of the hon. Member for Oldham, West.

Mr. Meacher: I gave way.

Dr. Mawhinney: And so have I. [Interruption.] I can understand why Opposition Members may dismiss their spokesman, the hon. Member for Oldham, West, but I just gave way to him, too.
No one can seriously doubt our commitment to ensuring that services in future are broadly based on the services run by BR at present. Indeed, just last week, the franchising director said:
I am determined to achieve the best possible service for passengers, and I will take into account commitments by bidders to improve on existing timetables when evaluating bids for these franchises.
The PSRs offer passengers more than the simple freezing of the existing timetable. I turn again to my right hon. Friend the Member for Southend, West because I have even better news for him, and indeed for the hon. Member for Thurrock (Mr. Mackinlay).
Take commuters on the London-Tilbury-Southend line, for example. Because the passenger service requirement specifies maximum load factors for peak services, they will receive a guarantee that the operator will have to put on extra trains if demand for services increases, instead of simply cramming more people into existing trains. That is exactly why for years that line has been called the misery line; the misery is at an end.
Secondly, PSRs allow the private operator space to develop commercially viable services in line with passenger demand, in addition to the guaranteed requirement. Specifying the existing timetable, as the hon. Member for Oldham, West would have us do, would reduce the scope for such initiative and deprive passengers of the very benefits that privatisation is designed to bring. The difference between us is that Conservative Members understand the way in which the private sector works and he does not—but, given his background, that is probably understandable.
Matching services to what customers want is precisely what the private sector does best. That is clearly demonstrated by previous privatisations and there is every reason to expect the same logic to apply to the railways. It is a logic that the Opposition have always denied—I acknowledge that they have the virtue of consistency—and they have always been proved wrong.
Let me correct one misapprehension that obviously afflicts the Labour party. To hear its members talk, one would think that the passenger service requirements had been decided and cast in stone. As I said earlier, that is not so, although the hon. Member for Oldham, West failed to recognise it. The announcement last week was of the start of a consultation process. Indeed, the hon. Member for Oldham, West will have to become used to the fact that that is how we do business nowadays. Instead of the centralised bureaucratic decision making so beloved of the Labour party, whereby the hon. Member for Oldham, West would sit on the Front Bench and determine the time, speed and location of every train in the nation, users of the railway are being consulted about what they want to happen. Passenger power is returning to the railways.

Mr. Mackinlay: On that narrow point, can the Secretary of State tell us how the member of the public who feels aggrieved can complain, and know to whom to complain, bearing in mind the multiplicity of franchises and the interests of Railtrack? Who will run that one-stop shop where he can complain about the diminished rail service and obtain a remedy?

Dr. Mawhinney: The responsibility to respond to a complaint will lie with the specific company that runs the service.

Mr. Mackinlay: How will he know?

Dr. Mawhinney: I think that we shall be able to help the hon. Gentleman in time. He needs to be patient.

Mr. Mackinlay: Ah. [Laughter]

Dr. Mawhinney: I hope that my hon. Friends will safely log that bout of laughter as the privatisation process develops.
Of course, the hon. Member for Oldham, West does not recognise any of that. He is too busy playing the tired old Opposition game—the tactic that they have used before every privatisation. He is trying to scare people. He will bemoan a job worry here, threaten a service cut there; anything to put at risk the service that he claims to support. With friends like him, the railways will always be in big trouble.
Still, the Opposition have always been wrong before. Privatisation has brought new services, better standards and more choice. They will be wrong again.
I drew attention in our previous debate to the endearing admission by the Leader of the Opposition that the British people do not trust Labour. How true; how very true. Tonight the hon. Member for Oldham, West has simply dug his party into an even deeper hole. His leader will be cross—perhaps I should say "crosser"—with him. The British people will compare his rhetoric—for we shall remind them—with the reality of the new railway, and they will trust Labour even less.
Our plans for the railways offer something new for passengers; they offer guarantees. For the first time there will be an absolute guarantee of service levels. No Labour Government ever offered passengers such an assurance, and the hon. Member for Oldham, West refused to do so this evening. No Liberal appears even to understand it. On 27 January, the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Mr. Tyler) warned that if the
minimum service requirements for the rail network are at any less than those we experienced before privatisation, then the Government has betrayed the travelling public".
There were no passenger service guarantees before privatisation.
The hon. Member for Oldham, West issued an even sillier press release on the same day. As he has demonstrated again tonight, he simply does not understand how the market economy works. He said:
The Secretary of State's appeal to the train operators to provide more than they are contracted to do is whistling in the wind".
He asked:
What operator in their right mind would take the risk of providing more than a bare minimum of services for which they will get no subsidy?
The operators have replied with a stinging rebuke. They want more services and, unlike the hon. Member for Oldham, West, they both know what they are talking about and can deliver. At least they understand the elementary basis on which the private sector works.
Operators are aware of the commercial opportunities that privatisation will bring. They recognise the incentives in the new system to provide services above passenger service requirement levels. They know that they will make more money if they can attract more passengers on to rail.

They realise that most of their costs will be covered by the guaranteed level of services. Therefore, additional services will be possible on the basis of marginal costs.
The hon. Member for Oldham, West simply does not understand any of that. He is out of touch and out of tune. This evening, the hon. Gentleman gave us his synthetic rage rendition, but we all noticed what he did not say. There was no mention of nationalisation, not a word about whether a Labour Government would return the railways to state control, no mention of any policy to reverse 50 years of decline, not a word about what a Labour Government would do to encourage more use of the railways. There was no mention of how Labour would fund investment; not a word about guaranteeing services.
I offer the hon. Member for Oldham, West the sympathy of the whole House, but he and his leader must simply soldier on in silence until the union leaders tell him what is the deal that they must accept for clause IV. Then he can tell us what he really thinks he has been told to think.
As I sat listening to the hon. Member for Oldham, West, I had a feeling that he reminded me of someone. Just before he sat down, it occurred to me who he reminded me of; it was one of those old-fashioned British Rail station announcers. Hon. Members will remember the people who used to make a muffled sound—like this—full of noise, but with nothing intelligible coming out. The Labour party has no policy and no intelligent thought, and says nothing intelligible on behalf of passengers. There is no chance that the House will support the hon. Gentleman tonight. The House will support the amendment.

Mrs. Gwyneth Dunwoody: I always enjoy the Secretary of State's performances. He reminds me of a small boy banging a dustbin lid in the dark to drive away the ghosties. He does it with such panache; there is no factual basis, but a lot of panache, and I do admire that.
The Secretary of State and the Conservative party do not represent the passengers and are not at all interested in them. It is important that the House should admit that. The Conservatives are interested in the movement of money. That is what interests them—not the provision of services but the movement of money, and the ability of private financiers or private companies to cream off from state assets that which will improve their own finances. On 14 December British Rail announced the service cuts that it would be forced to make because it was required to improve its financial position by 10 per cent. this year. That announcement so frightened the Secretary of State that, as soon as it became public, he rushed out a statement to say that of course he did not want cuts and that he favoured the line that he has pushed tonight.
British Rail told the truth: it was required to cut its finances by 10 per cent. which would directly affect its current operations. Because the Secretary of State made a great fuss and said that there would be no cuts, that the existing timetable would continue and that all would be well, it became very clear that he had to act.
Between 14 December and today there has been a considerable amount of straightforward and hard-nosed negotiation and, somehow or other, British Rail's external financing limit has been expanded by £64 million. That


has made the difference, and British Rail is now able to confirm that it will maintain its existing services and withdraw its threats of 14 December to cut services.
It is important to describe the money-go-round in considerable detail. Sir Alfred Sherman said recently that he could not see any point in denationalising or selling off any industry that did not make money. He could not see the logic behind the Government's decision to privatise the railways.
For the past five years the Government have pushed British Rail to change its work patterns and to undertake considerable reorganisation and modernisation. If, at the end of that period, British Rail was unable to demonstrate increased profits—indeed, even climb back to the small increases that it had made on some lines in the early 1980s—it would be clear that it would not be able to make enormous profits in the future.
The reality is that heavy subsidies will be provided. The regulator has said that track access charges will be reduced and the railways will earn 8 per cent. on the new assets. The Secretary of State has not explained to the House how the system will fragment British Rail. Calculating assets at a different rate will mean that the taxpayer will pay a great deal more in subsidies in the future. The Secretary of State has assured us, "Don't worry, that money will go around the system. It will be recirculated and it will return to the Treasury when there is a profit."

Mr. Elfyn Llwyd: The hon. Lady will know that, under Treasury rules, a subsidy can be guaranteed for a socially necessary service for only three years. Is that correct?

Mrs. Dunwoody: The passenger service obligation is very important, as is what will happen to the passenger transport executives which have had direct input into the services that they thought were important. They cannot guarantee the future of those passenger services which the Secretary of State talked about tonight because they do not know what the level of funding will be or what extra expenses they will face.
Fragmentation of the service continues apace and the cost of privatisation—which will be borne almost entirely by the taxpayer—is boosted by totally unnecessary expenditure. The British Rail Business Systems Bureau Services currently leases systems software which is used to control the mainframe computers at Crewe and Nottingham.
Two products are leased from Computer Associates, an American software supplier, and there is a licence fee for each package—only two fees in all. Due to the fragmentation of the specialist systems, that company is saying that, following privatisation, it will require a licence fee for each package for each company. There will be at least 80 companies, so it does not take long to work out what the cost will be for new software—that is before we add the expense of computers and the reorganisation that we have heard so much about.
British Rail has invested £1.5 billion in the new Eurostar in the past few years. The Government intend to carve up those assets and to offer them free of charge to the private sector. They have done that before in the privatisation process and undoubtedly they will do it again

here. They will not use the assets to improve facilities throughout the British Rail system or to provide the extra services that the Secretary of State makes so much play about.
I do not know who will build all those wonderful new trains, but I do know that they will not be built by British companies or by British workers. However, the money will come from British taxpayers—that will be our only future involvement in the new trains.
The Secretary of State and his colleagues are proposing a three-card trick of monumental effrontery which will take large sums of money from the railway system and which will generate large sums of money for the private sector—not only the transport element, but the estate agents, lawyers and accountants who are presently working in the system—at great cost to the passengers.
What is happening to British Rail is outrageous. It has undergone enormous change in the past five years and it needs a period of stability. It needs an opportunity to develop in order to meet the challenges posed by other forms of transport. Rail competes with road and air transport, but the Government have not made clear the challenges that British Rail faces.
I am afraid that we may be seeing the end of the railway system in this country. However, we will not see an end to asset stripping because, whichever way one looks at it, privatisation is a giant asset-stripping process. It is a very efficient way of taking money out of taxpayers' pockets, and the cost in social need and increased pollution, apart from the finance involved, will be stupendous.

Mr. Graham Riddick: I am grateful to have the opportunity to speak in the debate. This is the first speech that I have made about rail privatisation since I served on the Standing Committee which considered the Railways Bill 18 months ago. What a joy that was—I see one or two friendly, and not so friendly, faces on the Opposition Benches.
During the Committee's consideration—when I was parliamentary private secretary to the then Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Norfolk, South (Mr. MacGregor)—I wondered whether it would be better to break up British Rail and recreate some of the old regional companies, such as LNER, the Great Western and so on, that existed before nationalisation.
Privatisation by franchise will provide opportunities for new companies and entrepreneurs to enter the railways market. I am confident that British Rail's managers who have transferred to some of the new companies will contribute to an enhanced rail performance. Rail passengers will benefit from the greater degree of autonomy and commercial freedom within the system. It is important that the Rail Regulator does not shackle the new companies to such an extent that they are unable to innovate, introduce new and different services and try new pricing arrangements.
When we privatised British Airways, we did not insist that the company should ensure that through-ticketing arrangements for flights were available in every city and town. Of course, in practice, they are so available, because it is in British Airways' commercial interests to ensure that potential air travellers deal with a customer-friendly business and can get tickets easily. So, too, is it in the interests of all the rail operating companies to ensure that


it is easy for passengers to buy rail tickets, which is why, under the new arrangements, far from there being fewer outlets from which to buy tickets, I would expect there to be more.
Similarly, far from simply operating the minimum number of services as specified by the franchising director, the train operating companies will be looking to get more people on to the railways and to run more services for passengers. As my right hon. Friend has said before now, the early feedback we are getting from operators is that that is exactly what they want to do; they want to run more services. That is what private enterprise is all about.
The hostility of Opposition Members to rail privatisation simply illustrates that they do not understand private enterprise and demonstrates once again that, despite the flowery, reassuring words that the Leader of the Opposition might offer the middle classes, the Labour party has not changed its spots. It still dislikes and distrusts private enterprise and free markets. Of course, the reason why the Labour party is able to get away with its scaremongering tactics at the moment is that privatisation has not yet come about and the positive developments which I believe will occur have not yet taken place.
I have come across an extremely interesting development that I shall relate to the House. For a few years the Green party has been running excursions in Yorkshire—a number of them have travelled on the Settle to Carlisle line. Last year, members of the Green party came to me with some concern about the track access charges which had been quoted by Railtrack and I took it up on their behalf. I was also concerned about the effect that privatisation might have on steam-hauled excursion trips.
I am a life member of the A4 Locomotive Society. Along with two others, my father bought the Sir Nigel Gresley from British Railways back in 1966. He is now president of the A4 Locomotive Society. I was concerned about whether the new regime might lead to fewer trips being available for steam engines on the new privatised railways—not a bit of it.
The March edition of The Railway Magazine contains two interesting articles. The first tells how Flying Scotsman Railways is taking over the operation of BR's special trains unit and will be running charter operations including steam trips similar to those run by BR. The second article relates the emergence of a new company called Days Out, which is run by an individual called Mel Chamberlain and has
a whole trainload of ideas for railtours during 1995.
Days Out is planning to run around 60 steam excursions, some hauled by the Sir Nigel Gresley, and The Railway Magazine has described the company's programme for 1995 as "formidable". I shall quote directly from the article:
The package and diversity of tours planned is impressive and with improved customer facilities, and lower ticket prices, Days Out may well succeed. If Mel Chamberlain does not manage to persuade the long-lost tourer back, it won't be through lack of trying.
That is only the tip of the iceberg. New people will come to the railways and new ideas will be introduced. Competition is already being introduced into one sector of the railways. At the end of the day, the key question

for Days Out is whether it can sell the seats. There will be a significant number of new seats and I hope that Days Out can do just that.
In the private sector the existing management of the gas, telecommunications and electricity companies, the existing management has always managed to improve the performance of once-sleepy nationalised industries. The privatised industries suddenly started to pay more attention to the needs of their customers rather than to the needs of the providers of their subsidies—the politicians and civil servants. They started to tackle the inefficiencies and restrictive practices which kept costs—and therefore prices—too high. That, along with tough regulation, is why telephone charges have fallen by 30 per cent. since 1984, gas prices have fallen by 23 per cent. since 1986 and the prices charged by local electricity companies such as Yorkshire Electricity have fallen by 15 per cent. since privatisation in 1990.
In the days when I had a proper job as a sales manager in industry, I spent a great deal of time travelling around the north of England and Scotland and, because I was not grand enough to have a mobile telephone, I had to use public phone boxes. It was an absolute nightmare finding one, and when I did, it usually did not work—in contrast to what happens today.
At the time of the privatisation of British Telecom, the Labour party said that public telephones would disappear from the streets and roads of Britain. In fact, there are more public phone boxes in existence today than ever before. There were 77,000 in 1984 and there are 127,000 today—and, what is more, they work. In those days it used to take six months to get a telephone installed in one's home; now it takes seven days.
Privatisation has led to improved services. Despite all the negative gloom and doom-mongering by the Opposition, it is just possible that we are on the verge of a new and exciting era when the railways can reverse the trend of decades of fewer passengers travelling by train. Nationalisation failed to reverse that trend; private enterprise now has the opportunity to achieve it by introducing new ideas, new capital and new services. I very much hope that it succeeds.

Mr. Charles Kennedy: The speech of the hon. Member for Colne Valley (Mr. Riddick) and that of the Secretary of State will go down in the annals of history as a categorical triumph of hope over experience. If, in later years, we want to measure the words that have been uttered in the House tonight, I suspect that the balance of prediction will lie more accurately with those of us opposed to the entire process than with those who are advocating it.
My hon. Friend the Member for Inverness, Nairn and Lochaber (Sir R. Johnston), at a meeting with the rail franchising director—one of the many hobgoblin figures created by the legislation—reminded Mr. Salmon and the rest of us that when Frankenstein was first created it was a benevolent idea and it was only subsequently that things went wrong and the monster developed a life of its own. That applies to the process of privatisation generally. The fragmentation is debilitating not just the existing rail network but the capacity of Transport Ministers to exercise the degree of ministerial direction that is now required.
I shall be specific and limited in referring to two decisions taken in December by the franchising director: first, that the sleeper services to Carlisle and Fort William respectively, and Motorail services generally, would not be included in the franchise that will be awarded in due course to ScotRail; and, secondly, what will happen beyond March to May this year in regard to direct links between London and the north of Scotland. I do so in the terms of the motion because I would argue that there has been a grotesque breach of faith and a downright breach of categorical assurances that were given to the House and to representatives of the highlands.
Let us take the phrase "based on" the passenger rail timetable of May 1994. I accept one of the points that the Minister made. I am not here tonight to argue—I draw a slight distinction with the hon. Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Meacher)—for an exact replica of May 1994. It is reasonable to anticipate that "based on" can mean, for example, the existing three passenger services a day between Glasgow and Oban, but that they might run at different times. That can be debated, but it is a reasonable distinction to draw.
But that is quantifiably different from saying that passenger services to, for example, Fort William will be based on the May 1994 timetable but with the exception that there will be no sleeper or Motorail services. That is of a different degree and is a categorical breach of faith.
On 17 February 1993, in a letter to Councillor Duncan McPherson, the convenor of Highland regional council, the then Minister for Public Transport said:
I assured you that the franchise"—
the one to which I have referred—
will be based on British Rail's 1994 timetable.
By 15 April 1993, the Minister was even more categorical. He told the Standing Committee that there would not be picking and choosing by the franchising director and that all the services then running would be franchised—"then" being May 1994. That is not the case. There has been picking and choosing by the franchising director and he has decided not to include the sleeper and Motorail services to which I referred.
On 25 May, the former Minister said that the franchising director would consult the appropriate local authorities. He has not done so. It is not just the franchising director who has not consulted local authorities, but the Ministers themselves who are not even willing to meet and listen to the local authority representatives who are travelling on a block booking from Fort William on the sleeper service to lobby the Scottish Grand Committee tomorrow.

The Minister for Railways and Roads (Mr. John Watts): rose

Mr. Kennedy: I shall happily give way to the Minister because so far his silence and unwillingness even to respond to the request has spoken volumes.

Mr. Watts: The hon. Gentleman will understand that Mr. Salmon has given an early indication of the approach that he is minded to take towards the sleeper services and Motorail, but the hon. Gentleman will know that he has not yet published a passenger service requirement covering those services. He will do so later in the year

and that will be the opportunity for those towards whom he has an obligation to consult to say what they think about what is and is not included in the proposals. Anything that happens in advance of that will be decisions made by British Rail under the present arrangements of the protected nationalised railway system.

Mr. Kennedy: The Minister has not been in his present position very long and it shows from that intervention. He clearly does not understand what is involved. I shall quote directly Mr. Salmon's words in a letter of 2 February to the convenor of Highland regional council.
Incidentally, yesterday, the Minister's Department denied that it had ever received an approach from Highland regional council in a letter dated 21 December. That is strange because the first sentence of the letter from the Director of Passenger Rail Franchising begins:
Thank you for your letter of 21 December to the Secretary of State for Transport.
Someone in the Department must have received it because it was quickly handed on to the director for him to reply. However, yesterday the Department denied any such receipt. The Minister might like to find out what is going on inside his Department before he lectures the rest of us.
What Mr. Salmon says stands in stark contrast to the blandishments that we have just heard. First, he acknowledges that, exceptionally, the announcement of 14 December was made in advance of the start of the consultation on ScotRail and west coast services. He continues:
Clearly, if British Rail proceed with the proposed changes in the May timetable, then these services will be withdrawn before OPRAF starts its consultation process. We would not, in such circumstances, include these particular services in the PSR consultation.
I repeat:
We would not, in such circumstances, include these services in the PSR consultation.
The Minister has just advised us that the services would be part of the PSR consultation, so who is right—the Minister or the director of franchising? What is said in the letter dated 2 February stands contradicts completely what the Minister has just said at the Dispatch Box.

Mr. Watts: The hon. Gentleman quoted Mr. Salmon's letter in which he explained that if services were withdrawn before he starts his consultation on the passenger service requirements he would not be including those services in his passenger service requirement. The hon. Gentleman will know that there is nothing to stop local authorities or rail users consultative councils, or right hon. and hon. Members, putting forward whatever views they have on inclusions in or exclusions from the PSR. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will avail himself of that opportunity if the hypothetical circumstances that he outlined pertain at the time.

Mr. Kennedy: Well, well, we have already moved our ground in the course of the past five minutes at the Dispatch Box. Let us be clear about one thing. There is a world of difference between consulting over a proposed level of service in a proposed timetable and consulting over a service that does not even feature in the timetable. There is light years' difference in that. Such retrospective consultation makes little sense.
Secondly, the body which, under the legislation, is charged with having the biggest say in the consultation is the rail users consultative committee. What does Major


General Lennox Napier, the chairman of the Central Rail Users Consultative Committee, say? He has written to Mr. Salmon, our dear friend, in the following terms:
By making a separate announcement about sleeper services and Motorail prior to releasing details of any of the PSRs, you appear to have pre-empted the consultation process on a highly controversial aspect of your proposals … Therefore, to allow time for a proper consultation process to take place, I am writing to request you:
(a) to consult the relevant consultative committees about your decision … and,
(b), not to permit the operators to discontinue any of the relevant services until your consultation with the consultative committees is complete and you have considered their representations on the subject."
That is the chairman of the Central Rail Users Consultative Committee, set up under the legislation by the Government, speaking on behalf of that body. Does the Minister endorse and support those sentiments? If so, that would send a useful signal to our friend Mr. Salmon on what he should do. Will the Minister clarify that? Does he support that expression? The Minister is uncharacteristically reticent. That tells us all we need to know.
The person to whom we shall be looking with regard to this disgraceful abuse of the guidelines that were laid down by the legislation and the contempt that has been shown for the consultative process has to be the Rail Regulator. I and my hon. Friends had a useful meeting with Mr. Swift last week when he made it clear that where evidence was forthcoming that suggested a breach of faith or irregular procedures he would want to consider that. I express the strong hope that he will do so. Because the great difference between the four franchises announced for consultation last week and the forthcoming one that affects Scotland is that in England and Wales there will be a proper public opportunity to be consulted and to express views through the legislation about everything, but in Scotland there will not. The Minister must face up to that.
Therefore, on the wider aspect, in conclusion, clearly the Minister does not have an answer, but his civil servants might be able to dredge one up for him at the end of the debate.
I simply say that when it is environmental policy to try to move more people off the roads on to rail, when it is agreed tourism policy for the Scottish economy that we want to develop our existing links to the south, and when we have just opened a channel tunnel which physically plugs us on to the rail network and infrastructure of the continent of Europe, to be cancelling all UK Motorail services and sleepers to Carlisle and Fort Williarn is a retrograde step of some considerable madness. When that is accompanied by bad faith and bad practice, the House should vote to condemn it at 10 o'clock tonight.

Mr. Richard Ottaway: When I hear the hon. Member for Ross, Cromarty and Skye (Mr. Kennedy) speaking with such authority about rail privatisation, my mind goes back to the debate in which the hon. Member for Gordon (Mr. Bruce), who is now the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, spoke about gas privatisation. He said proudly:
16 million British Gas consumers can expect only one result—to pay increased gas prices, higher than the rate of inflation, for years to come."—[Official Report, 10 December 1985; Vol. 88, c. 793.]

How history has proved him wrong. I believe that it will prove the hon. Member for Ross, Cromarty and Skye wrong on this occasion.
Listening to the Opposition, one would believe that they were experts. Yet they know that state ownership in this country has failed. Across the world, country after country has followed the example of the Conservative Government and introduced privatisation. In 1979, the nationalised industries were costing the taxpayer £50 million a week. Today, they earn £60 million a week. Even the Labour party has now lost the will to fight on the issue, and that is typified in its debate about the future of clause IV. The reason why it has changed its mind is that it knows that it has got it wrong in the past. The Government have invested billions in British Rail, and since the war some £54 billion has been invested in the railways. In 1953, some 17 per cent. of journeys were by train, and 24 per cent. of goods. Today, both figures are nearer 5 per cent. and falling.
The concept of state ownership is bankrupt. Why? In my constituency, I have no fewer than 12 railway stations, and rail privatisation is always a lively issue. The service from Purley, in the heart of my constituency, to Victoria is not bad at all. There are four trains an hour, and a cheap-day return costs something like £3.20—not a lot of money. Those trains are empty. Yet the A23 through Streatham is jammed full with cars. Why? It is because the railways are perceived to be unreliable and inconvenient. In the peak hours, commuters pay £7.20. They need to use the train, but are faced with crowded, unreliable, unpunctual and, often, dirty trains.

Sir Russell Johnston: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Ottaway: I am sorry, but unless I am given injury time, I cannot give way.
Those customers are dissatisfied. They have no way to complain. Is not that typical of all the old nationalised industries—a centralised bureaucracy funded by taxpayers' money, concerned more with supply than with what the market demands? Why do we not have fewer trains in the daytime and more in the rush hour? The reason is that the railways are stuck on the old requirements to supply services. It astonishes me that Opposition Members—indeed, members of the public—want us to continue that.
This is where the whole ethos of privatisation comes into the matter. Nationalisation was a central feature of post-war Labour Governments, but few people today deny that it imposed intolerable burdens on the national economy. Labour naively believed that control of the railways would be vested in the people. In reality, power was transferred to monopoly providers and monopoly producer unions. The real power was exercised by civil servants, who became the protector and confidant of the industry's self-interest and, indeed, on occasions, the politicians in power.
Privatisation is now copied throughout the world. I had the good fortune last week to go to Japan, with the President of the Board of Trade, and went on the privatised railway from Tokyo to Nagoya. In a recent report, the transport correspondent of The Times said:
Japan is demonstrating that privatised railway companies can be not only efficient and profitable but also popular with investors.


As I sat on that comfortable high-speed train, knowing that it was run by private money, I knew precisely what he meant.
I welcome the passenger service requirements, because they will provide a customer safeguard of a minimum level of service. We all know that the expected level of service will be considerably higher, because the incentive to provide more services is there. The hon. Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Meacher)—unfortunately, he is not here now—rather played around with the possibility that the service between Dawlish and the west country may go via Peterborough. What he completely ignored—this shows his ignorance of the workings of capitalism—is that if there was a demand for more services, the operators would provide them.
In future, the customer will be able to rely on two components: a guaranteed minimum service, and a commercially responsive addition to that service. The first operators have already been announced. We have seen the reaction. I do not know how many hon. Members have received the brochure from Great Western Railways, entitled "Business First". It starts with the comforting headline:
Cruise in comfort at an altitude of 61 feet".
It says:
now, as a dynamic company with a brand new look and a stronger than ever commitment to customer service, we can offer you the standard of travel that truly meets your demands".
It has
brand new staff … Each is a highly trained professional".
It will provide
high quality refreshments and even, on selected services, video and audio entertainment during your journey".
One can also choose various price structures.
We are talking about the old British Rail, but we live in a new world. When the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody) said that she feared the demise of the old British Rail, she was absolutely right. We have a new railway coming and a new type of service.
Why do the Opposition continue their opposition to privatisation and make the same old arguments of doom and gloom? They were wrong about every other privatisation. They will be wrong about this one. One has only to look at some of the quotations that they have come up with in recent years to see that. The right hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams), when shadow energy spokesman, said about electricity privatisation:
It strikes me that a minimum estimate of the cost of privatisation to the consumer in terms of price increases is 20 per cent"—[Official Report, 12 December 1988; Vol. 143, c. 723.]
He was wrong.
The hon. Member for Gordon, whom I quoted earlier, said that electricity privatisation
will result in higher prices for the whole population".—[Official Report, 10 April 1989; Vol. 150, c. 585.]
He was wrong.
The right hon. Member for Salford, East (Mr. Orme), when shadow energy spokesman, said on the privatisation of British Gas:
There is no evidence that the Bill will improve efficiency, provide a better service, produce cheaper gas or, least of all, create competition."—[Official Report, 10 December 1985; Vol. 88, c. 780.]

How wrong he was.
The hon. Member for Glasgow, Garscadden (Mr. Dewar) said of the privatisation of British Steel that it was
a shoddy measure which promises destabilising uncertainty. It is totally irrelevant to the real interests of the industry"—[Official Report, 23 February 1988; Vol. 128, c. 238.]
The fact is that British Steel, having made losses of £1.7 million, made profits of £733 million.
The late John Smith, who was then the right hon. Member for Lanarkshire, North and who was not often wrong, said that privatising British Airways
 is a bad deal for the airline and for the British taxpayer".
Let us go back to the hon. Member for Garscadden, who is constantly putting his foot in it. He said that British Airways
will be the pantomime horse of capitalism if it is anything at all."—[Official Report, 19 November 1979; Vol. 974, c. 53, 125.]
The fact is that British Airways has run up a profit of more than £2.7 billion.

Mr. Brian Wilson: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The debate is on rail passenger services. The fact is that the Tory central office briefs do not stretch to a word on rail services.

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Geoffrey Lofthouse): That is not a matter for the Chair.

Mr. Ottaway: It is not a Conservative central office brief, but a pamphlet that I wrote. The hon. Gentleman is free to read it any time he likes.
The point that I am trying to make is that the Labour party's forecasts about the future of privatisation have been wrong. There is no reason why we should listen to it this time any more than we have in the past.
Every privatisation has brought increased investment and service to the customer. This privatisation should be no different. Its dependence on public funding has let down British Rail in the past, and the Government now want to put it on a sound financial footing. Not only is Labour incapable of reforming public services, but it remains unsure whether to cling to the past and call for renationalisation or whether to try to push for a pale imitation of Conservative policy—a rose by any other name. While the Labour party ties itself up in arguments about clause IV, the rest of the world has had the debate and reached a conclusion. Privatisation has worked and has been copied throughout the world. Let us allow the benefits to be felt by the railways.

Mr. Brian H. Donohoe: I thought that we were here this evening to speak about passenger services under rail privatisation, not to be given some quotations about other utilities that have been privatised. Let us stick to the subject itself.
I have three areas of doubt that I want to bring to the attention of the Government: first, from a Scottish perspective, the funding situation; secondly, the infrastructure; and thirdly, the withdrawal of services. I want to give practical reasons for my doubts on whether, under privatisation, passenger services will be improved. First, let me deal with funding.
Over the past 15 to 20 years, the funding of British Rail in Scotland has relied almost exclusively on the passenger transport executive in Strathclyde region. Since 1975,


some £400 million has been invested in Strathclyde's railways—about £30 million a year. We are told that, because of changes in the franchising system, the sum will be increased to a staggering £112 million next year—three times the amount expected from the local PTE. We are also told that, although the money will come from the Government in the first year, there is no guarantee that it will continue to do so.
At the same time, new unitary authorities are being introduced in Scotland. Can hon. Members imagine small unitary authorities being able to go on financing the railways to the tune of £112 million? How will they apportion the cost? They will start to fight among themselves.
At present, there is only one train from Argyll to Helensburgh; Cunninghame—the area represented by my hon. Friend the Member for Cunninghame, North (Mr. Wilson) and me, which will become the North Ayrshire unitary authority—has some 10 stations, with trains running the length and breadth of both our constituencies. How can the Government expect funding to continue in the same way when two local authorities have been merged into, as it were, a central bank?
Unless assurances are given, the whole network will suffer. There must be funding either from the top downwards or from the local authorities upwards, and we clearly cannot expect funding from the bottom up to continue. The Scottish Office and the Department of Transport must become involved. None of the changes will be clear to those who will become responsible for most of the funding, and the figures must be stated in a way that they can understand.
I am also doubtful about the continuation of high standards in infrastructure. The Forth bridge, which is described internationally as the eighth wonder of the world, was built to standards that we in Scotland know as "Clyde class", but it is now badly corroded. Earlier this year, I visited the bridge with my hon. Friends the Members for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell) and for Midlothian (Mr. Clarke). Although we went on the say-so of Railtrack, it was clear to us as we went underneath the bridge in a boat that the cross-members were corroded. The Scottish Office says that the problems are purely cosmetic, but the failure to paint the bridge during the past couple of years has obviously resulted in terminal damage. Railtrack, which owns it, has failed in its duty to maintain the eighth wonder of the world; meanwhile, it is taking some £170 million a year from ScotRail.
I am told that stocks are now at their lowest-ever level, and that no rail clips have been ordered in the past few months. That will obviously affect passengers in the future. Last month, for the first time, ScotRail failed to meet the standards of the much-hailed passenger charter in either its eastern or its central section. How can it be held reponsible, when most of the failures that have been identified are Railtrack's responsibility? This is the beginning of what will result from full-scale privatisation of the railways.
Signalling and infrastructure faults have been identified as Railtrack's problem. I understand that the signalling system at Haymarket remains incomplete even now, some nine months after its inception, and that a further £1 million needs to be spent if delays are not to continue. It is nonsensical to split responsibilities. Earlier, someone asked who would be responsible for explaining why a train was late. It is clear that there will be more difficulties

than ever. Only this week, my train to Glasgow Central was delayed; faulty signals were blamed, and Railtrack was said to be the source of the problem. There is, however, no suggestion that ScotRail will be compensated, and again passengers will suffer.
Fortunately, much of what I was going to say about the withdrawal of services has already been said by the hon. Member for Ross, Cromarty and Skye (Mr. Kennedy), but the Government must answer our concerns about the threat to sleeper services in Scotland. I am told that the regulator proposes a cut from five to two. The hon. Gentleman mentioned the problems caused by the restriction to 16 coaches at Euston. I do not know how the services will be run with split trains; perhaps the Minister will be able to tell us. We have already heard about the problems involved in the withdrawal of Motorail.
That is all the tip of the iceberg. Given that every route in Scotland is currently subsidised, how can those routes be maintained in the private sector? It is nonsensical; it is a joke. The Government's snide remarks show how seriously they treat the problem. This week we have seen perhaps the most ludicrous aspect of rail travel as it now is. A picture in the local press today shows a railway carriage being taken down the road for repair. Perhaps the Government want that to happen to all railway carriages.
The late Robert Adley, who chaired the Transport Select Committee, called rail privatisation the poll tax on wheels. Unfortunately, there will be no wheels to tax.

Mr. Anthony Steen: The hon. Member for Cunningham, South (Mr. Donohoe) put a forceful argument for privatisation. He said that things were pretty bad, and would become worse with privatisation. I believe that they will become better.
The west country has been mentioned a fair amount this evening. In my experience, rail services there have become progressively worse, especially in the past two years. The new timetable considerably lengthens the journey time to Totnes, one of the two British Rail stations in my constituency. I think that part of British Rail's programme is to make the journeys slower so that when trains arrive late it need not pay so much compensation under the passengers charter. If my experience is anything to go by, the situation has got worse and I hope that privatisation will make it better.
British Rail uses a raft of excuses—"BR-speak," as I call it. For example, slugs on the line stop heavyweight carriages dead in their tracks; bridges are in a perpetual state of repairs; floods always cover the line between Taunton and Exeter, not to mention the cursed sea at Dawlish, which is always going over the tracks just beyond that town. Freak thunderstorms cause power failures in Cornwall; not only does that county seem to be in permanent darkness, but the trains are always shunted on to sidings and fleets of buses take people from one station to another to connect with other trains. Then there is the ubiquitous phantom of Westbury—the cow that is so regularly seen on the line. Whenever the train is on time, the driver stops dead because he says that there is a cow on the line. One always hears at Paddington that the delay has been caused by a cow—it is more like Bombay or Delhi than Westbury—and if there is no cow on the line, then signals, points and crossings will do the trick.
For the past three months, no train to Totnes or Ivybridge that I have been on has been on time. That is borne out by a parliamentary answer that I received in July last year, when the then Minister said that in 1991 only 62.6 per cent. of trains arrived in Plymouth on time, in 1992 only 61.2 per cent. arrived on time, and in 1993 only 61.9 per cent. arrived on time. Fewer than two thirds of trains arrived according to the timetable time.
The one exception is the sleeper. Here I should like to take a little credit; one does not get much credit in this place, and I never get the credit, but I played a part in stopping the Government, with BR, taking off the sleeper service to Penzance. When I was in Liverpool, I had a reputation for preventing BR from taking off sleeper services to the north-west, although it did just that as soon as I was transferred to South Hams. My hon. Friend the Minister will correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that the sleeper service is to be included in the franchise document, so it is safe for the next two or three years, although it will have to be used more if it is to be saved.
I said that the sleeper always arrives on time, but that is not quite true. A few months ago, I was waiting in Exeter station for the sleeper at 1 o'clock. I waited until 2.30 in the morning, but no sleeper arrived, though I pay tribute to BR for providing free cups of tea and blankets.
The problem with west country services is not only that the timetable has slipped but that trains arrive progressively later than the timetable time, with a difference of some 15 or 20 minutes, which produces growing anxiety in the minds of travellers that they will arrive late if they go by rail. More people are taking to the road, which is the last thing that we want as our west country roads are already saturated with cars which I suspect are driven by people who would have gone by rail but for the feeling that rail services are unreliable.
Rail travel is also expensive. It is more expensive to travel first class from London to Plymouth than to travel Apex from London to Gibraltar by plane—1200 miles by air is cheaper than 227 miles by train—and it takes longer to go to Plymouth by train than to go to Paris or Brussels. No wonder we in the west country feel somewhat discriminated against—like some sort of outpost of Europe, with Cornwall feeling that even more than Devon.
The problem of delays and the slowness of trains to Totnes is even worse on Sundays, when it is virtually impossible to travel from Totnes to London in under four hours. The other day it took me five and a half hours because of cows on the line at Westbury. We tend to get diverted on Sundays via Yeovil and Chippenham. Although both are beautiful parts of the country, many of us do not appreciate that unscheduled guided tour of the region.
One of the problems with BR is overmanning. I do not know whether this is correct, but I am told that there have to be two men in the cab in trains travelling between London and Reading because the train goes at 125 mph. If it goes at 110 mph, only one is needed. The unions have insisted on doubling the staff by putting an extra man in the cab. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Minister

will tell me whether there are two men in the cab when trains go through Slough at 125 mph even though only one is actually doing anything.

Mr. Watts: I must confess that I have not counted the number of men in the cab when trains go through Slough at 125 mph—or, indeed, when they stop at Slough, as they do and will continue to do.

Mr. Steen: That is helpful. The Minister will no doubt find that out, but I am told that it is the case.
On the journey from London to Totnes, every few seconds someone clips one's ticket. Every time the train stops, another man clips the ticket. My ticket looks like one of the sheets in my passport because there are so many ticket collectors. They are good and nice, and they add a certain presence on the train, but we do not need so many of them. The restrictive practices involved in overmanning are well illustrated by the number of ticket collectors. I hope that that will not happen after privatisation.
Trains have been so late that I have been using the charter. I have collected so many vouchers that every time I go to Totnes I can now dine royally in the BR restaurant car. The only snag is that the restaurant cars are being taken up. I am sure that there will be a great improvement after privatisation.
I am a great railway enthusiast and I am well known for the support that I have given to BR and InterCity. The managing director of rail services in the west country does an excellent job, but the problem is that the service is in decline. To entice people back on to railways, we need faster and cheaper railways, and more reliable services.
On summer weekends, a train travels from Paddington to Totnes in just under two and a half hours. It is an exhilarating journey. The train is always full to the gunnels, with people hanging out of the windows, egging the driver on. One would like to see more of that. In winter, the trains are full of depressed passengers, paying through the nose, having their tickets clipped incessantly, and drowning their sorrows in powdered coffee and tea from the buffet, or in French water and wine. Would you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, expect to find English wine or water on SNCF trains in France? Can you imagine the French serving exclusively English wine or water on SNCF? Of course not—only French wine and French water would be served. When the service is privatised, I hope that British goods, and not all that European stuff, will be served on trains because British goods are not served on French trains.
The final reason why we should give privatisation a throw is that it may give the Government the opportunity to put some of the money that they invest in railways into building new railways. I want more money to be spent on new railway lines. I do not see why we could not have new railway lines if the money given in subsidy to British Rail were released and used for new lines between, for example, Exeter and Plymouth. That is what everyone wants. In Italy and France, new lines and motorways are built in minutes, so why not in this country?
I am all for the service in my region being privatised. It cannot be worse than it is now. The region is crying out for improved infrastructure and if privatisation will provide that, I am all for it.

Mr. Keith Hill: You will be pleased to hear, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that I intend to speak with exemplary brevity and, somewhat unusually in this debate, about rail passenger services.
As a member of the Select Committee on Transport, I sat through about 150 hours of its inquiry into the Government's rail privatisation plans. As a member of the Standing Committee which debated the Railways Act 1993, I sat through about 100 hours of debate on the detail of the privatisation programme. I can also say in all honesty that I have attended every debate in the House on rail privatisation since April 1992. Throughout that dauntingly long process, Ministers have repeated like a mantra the notion that franchises would be based on the existing timetable. In his opening speech, my hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State for Transport provided irrefutable proof of that proposition.
Even when Ministers have referred to minimum service requirements, which I am bound to say has not been very often, not once have they said—again, this is a matter of record—that the minimum service requirements would be less than the existing timetable. If words mean anything—we are entitled to take them at face value—Ministers have led Parliament to understand that they were not envisaging any reduction in services. Now, however, we know that they are. However Ministers may duck and dive, the blunt truth is that the passenger service requirements represent the only level of services to which franchisees are contractually committed. If that is all that a franchisee wants to run, that is all that he will run and no amount of weasel words can disguise that simple fact. It might be said that we have heard enough such words during the long debate on rail privatisation.
The rabbit out of the hat—the deus ex machina—for the Secretary of State is the fact that the rail passenger has never had guaranteed services before. He said today that for the first time there would be an absolute guarantee of services. If we had a Government committed to a decent public transport system and prepared to invest in the railways at the same level as our European partners, we might not need a guarantee anyway.
We heard a great deal from Conservative Members about the benefits of privatisation, but they very often drew comparisons with the excellent services—and the speed with which new services could be introduced—in countries such as Italy and France, where railways are run on a nationalised basis. As Lord Marsh, who is no ally of the Labour party, told the Transport Select Committee, the railway industry was the one industry whose problems could be solved only by throwing money at it. That is a fact.
It is worth noting that the so-called guarantee will in the foreseeable future apply only to that small portion of the railway on which the franchises will operate. There are no guarantees of any description for the rest of the railway system, and certainly not for the branch lines about which we hear so frequently from the Secretary of State when he is trying to justify his policies on the radio.
Given that a disproportionate amount of subsidy will be dished out to the franchises to make them attractive to the private sector, the rest of the network is likely to remain a Cinderella for the indefinite future. There will be no fairy godmother to whisk the rest of British Rail off

to the ball or to any golden high-speed future in the sky. While the Conservatives are in power, the prospects are grim indeed for passengers on most parts of the network.
What is the quality of the so-called guarantee that is on offer? There is a clear implication in everything that has been said that a guaranteed minimum means that a franchisee will not be able to run services below that level. But that is not so, and I will explain why.
On 15 December 1993, the Select Committee on Transport took evidence from the newly appointed franchising director, Mr. Roger Salmon. In the course of the interview, I asked him what would happen if the Treasury decided to cut the subsidy to the franchised railway. It had happened plenty of times to British Rail, so why not to the franchisees? Interestingly, the franchising director did not dismiss the possibility out of hand. On the contrary, he answered my question with admirable candour and I will quote his reply in extenso. It is reported on page 11 of the Committee's minutes of evidence, entitled "Arrangements for Railway Privatisation", printed on 15 December 1993. About the Government, Mr. Salmon said:
It will have ability to change those subsidies under certain circumstances … If there is a shortage of money, one of the ways British Rail tends to react, at the moment, is by cutting investment or putting up fares. The Franchising Director, by and large, will have similar options regarding existing franchises that have been let. He will be able to change minimum specifications. He will be able to change fare levels and thereby ask the franchisee to save money and pass those savings …. back to the Exchequer.
In the words of the franchising director, speaking of his own powers in relation to minimum service guarantees,
He will be able to change minimum specifications.
There is no guaranteed minimum. It can always he lowered—we have it from the mouth of the man who can do it.
Members of Parliament and the public have allowed themselves to be led up the garden path for too long in the belief that there would be no reduction in service levels under privatisation. One thing is entirely clear: we should be under no illusions that there are any guarantees about minimum levels of service.

Mr. Robert Key: I shall have no hesitation in voting against the Labour party's motion and voting in favour of my right hon. Friend's amendment, which is entirely sensible and practical.
I allow myself a little chuckle as we debate a very serious issue when I think of the year that I spent very happily as Minister for Roads and Traffic. I became almost exclusively associated with roads and motor cars, which was to me a great irony, as I shall explain. My loss is the gain of my hon. Friend the Minister, and I wish him well. I suspect that he will find life easier being Minister for Railways and Roads than I ever did as Minister responsible for roads alone.
I have a confession to make: I love trains. I started early with my Hornby 00 gauge and continued by building up my son's collection of rather splendid electric trains. While some hon. Members may have catalogued their visits to New York and Tokyo according to sights, mine were catalogued by visits to train shops.
However, my experience of real-world trains, and passenger services on them throughout my life, has been a little different. I grew up with the steam age on my local


railway line through Salisbury. I also had the excitement of family holidays to the west coast of Scotland, when I travelled, often overnight, from King's Cross to Mallaig or Kyle of Lochalsh on the sleeper trains and, occasionally on the Motorail. Indeed, this debate will have done a great service to such routes. The consultation process seems to be going rather well if tonight's debate is anything to go by. Mr. Salmon will have plenty of heavy reading to do, as well as thinking.
In the days of my trips to Scotland, the hon. Member for Cunninghame, North (Mr. Wilson), when I first came across him, was the radical editor of the West Highland Free Press; an excellent document. I find it difficult to understand why the hon. Gentleman has become such a reactionary and I have become the radical.
My other memory was of the branch lines for passenger services throughout the south and west, the old push-me pull-you between Salisbury and Downton or Newton Abbot and Teigngrace. In Devon, I explored the old granite tramways from Haytor to the coast and Brunel's hydraulic railway along the coast from Starcross, where the pump house still stands. I have also extensively used trains in Germany, which, incidentally, are not all that they are cracked up to be, and I have worried my American friends by insisting on travelling by train rather than by air, for example when I undertook a 17-hour journey from Portland to San Francisco on the Starlight Express. I also saw the future on the bullet train from Osaka to Tokyo.
However, railway nostalgia alone simply will not do. I fear that the Opposition parties—I notice that not one Liberal Democrat is gracing the Opposition Benches—have given train spotters a bad name in this debate. The future is now with us in the superb Eurostar trains running through the channel tunnel and the journey has been transformed by facing up to the reality of railway infrastructure finance. I have been taught that railways adapt or die; they serve their passengers or they meet the Rev. Awdry in the happy, shunting yard upstairs.
The issue is not simply money. Successive Governments have spent on railways more than £1 billion for every year that I have been on this planet. And for what? For a decade and more my constituents have complained week in, week out about the service that they were receiving from British Rail.
Admittedly, there has been some good management at the top, but it has been impossible for those people to make an impact on the vast spongy bureaucracy and inertia that is British Rail. Sometimes there has been spasmodic investment. For example, we were promised some second-hand trains; they did not come. We were promised a painted station; that did happen. We were promised, and got, a loop line at Tisbury, and there has been talk of reopening stations at Wilton and Porton.
However, the timetable was always enormously inflexible. At weekends—the time when most people want to travel to London, for functions, for sport or for some other kind of leisure, and to come home again late at night—the timetable was reduced, because otherwise it would not have suited British Rail. The cry was always that that was the time when all the engineering was done.
When I was a Minister with responsibility for tourism, I visited Cornwall at the invitation of my hon. Friend the Member for St. Ives (Mr. Harris), who has done more

than anyone in Cornwall to champion the cause of railways. His constituents told me that BR simply would not listen to what they said about their needs, and about the patterns and cycles of holiday bookings in the south-west.
Then the Government made a commitment to privatisation. All of a sudden, British Rail started to react. Suddenly, we had our new trains and a more flexible timetable. British Rail was starting to wake up, but it was too late. I became a late convert to the Government's policy of rail privatisation.
As the Secretary of State said, what the franchising director has produced is not a timetable but a consultation exercise—the first-ever consultation on our railways. I believe that there are issues more important than the timetable. None the less, when I compare my existing timetable with the South West Trains passenger service requirement, I realise why the hon. Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Meacher) totally failed to mention the main line from Waterloo through Salisbury to Exeter. If he had done the homework on that line that I have done, he would have discovered that the passenger requirement follows the present timetable closely, and that does not suit the Labour party's argument. The two are similar in terms of level of service, but for the first time there is a guaranteed minimum, and now there is every incentive for running additional, marginally costed revenue-raising passenger services.
The great old regional companies certainly served their purpose—sometimes there were regional monopolies; sometimes there was cut-throat competition—but we must move on from those days. The early privatisations of gas and telecommunications were a success, but of course both have had to be modified. I warmly support the present exciting concept of separating the capital investment in the infrastructure of the railways from the services that provide revenue flows. In the international context, that is the most important thing that has happened to investment in railway systems for half a century.
Until now, there has been little incentive for British Rail to listen to the passenger, but now the franchisees will have every incentive not only to run a timetable to match existing loading but to generate the new markets in rail travel that are there for the picking.
My last observation is that British Rail has had a people problem. When I get on a train from my constituency and travel from Salisbury to Waterloo the journey, on good railway rolling stock, is now a real pleasure. More often than not the train is on time, and not only the trains but the people are a pleasure. There is the friendly guard, or the senior conductor, as I should call him; even the people pushing the tea trolleys seem to be enjoying themselves—something that could rarely be said of staff under the old regime. It is a happy transformation that the people now running the railway services seem to be realising that it is in their interests, too, to do a good job of work and to welcome their passengers—or, as I rather regret that they now call us, their customers.
However, that does not always happen. In the light of other great privatisations and transitions, it is important for the new railway companies and franchisees to understand that the period of transition is a difficult one for their work force. In the case of British Airways, there was real resentment among its staff, and much the same applies in the ambulance services. The success of the Nothumbrian ambulance service when compared with the


London service shows that, however much capital equipment is put into a service, it will not work unless the people who are running the services are working with the system that is introduced.
Privatisation is not just about the timetable, nor is it even just about infrastructure investment. Passengers also need to feel that all railway staff from the top downwards arc having a change of heart. British Airways, British Gas, British Steel, the power companies and the water companies are all now world-beating companies, and undoubtedly a better use has been made of the taxpayers' original investment. I am absolutely confident that the same can be true of the railways.

Mr. Hugh Bayley: In denigrating British Rail, the hon. Member for South Hams (Mr. Steen) asked whether it was conceivable that one would be able to buy English water or wine on a French train. If the hon. Gentleman went to France, he might find that he was riding on a British-built train, as the new tram for Strasbourg was built in my constituency at ABB carriage works in York.
York is a railway town. Eighteen months ago, 4,700 people in York worked for the railway—one in 12 of the work force. In the past 18 months, that number has fallen to 3,500, a drop of 1,200. The hon. Member for Salisbury (Mr. Key) may talk of jolly tea trolley pushers on trains, but there are also thousands of people who have lost their jobs.
One might ask what effect those job losses will have on the passenger. Let me refer to two problems which we have in York. The first is that the 170 employees of Interlogic Control Engineering have been told that they will lose their jobs. The second is that 750 employees of ABB carriage works in York fear that they will be told soon that they will lose their jobs if, in the next seven or eight weeks, the company does not get a further order of the type of trains that it builds.
Signalling is the life-blood of the safety system for the railways, and if 170 signalling engineers are sacked, one builds up problems for the railways. The lack of new rolling stock is something that I do not need to explain, as other Members on both sides of the House have called for investment in new rolling stock.
Since this is a short debate, I must confine myself to two examples. The cause of most—not all—of the fatal railway accidents that have occurred recently is found to be in a signalling fault. One thinks of Clapham, and also—although the reports are not yet out—of the Cowden crash. Last week's crash on the Carlisle to Settle line was another example. In each case, it appears as though a signalling fault or a failure to provide an adequate signalling system was responsible.
Following the Clapham crash, the British Railways Board commissioned the Hesketh report, which identified a huge backlog of investment in signalling. That led to the creation of the British Rail signalling project group, and to the employment of some 1,500 additional skilled signalling engineers. As part of the preparation for privatisation, the signalling project group split into two separate companies—Interlogic Control Engineering and Signal Control UK. As I have mentioned, Interlogic has decided to close its York office with the loss of all 170 of its employees.
The decision was taken—I am told—to make the company viable for sale to the private sector. The managing director, Dr. Geoffrey Cowley, who himself is planning to lead a management buy-out took that decision. He is putting the redundancy costs on to British Rail to produce a company that will suit him when he puts in his management buy-out bid. I met Dr. Cowley last week, and he said that the job losses were inevitable because the company's business plan anticipated that the company would be designing schemes worth £180 million in the current year. It has won design work for schemes worth £105 million, because Railtrack has cut investment in signalling.
Such cuts have a direct effect on the public, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cunninghame, South (Mr. Donohoe) said. The collapse of Haymarket interlocking, the signal box, has resulted in months and months of delays for travellers from Glasgow to London, and we heard this evening that those delays continue.
In a Wednesday morning debate two weeks ago, we had the opportunity to debate the job losses at ABB carriage works in York, so I shall not go over that ground again. I simply say that new carriages are badly needed by passengers on the Kent coast services. They are needed to improve the service's reliability, comfort and safety. Despite the fact that those carriages have been promised for five years, in statement after statement from British Rail managers and Transport Ministers, the carriages will not be ordered in the foreseeable future because British Rail says that it will delay replacement until 1999.
I learnt at the end of last year that British Rail was keen to provide a service to customers by ordering those new carriages, but it cannot do so for financial reasons. Sir Bob Reid wrote to me on 21 November last year and said:
At present, we have no plans to place orders for new trains, nor do the newly formed rolling stock leasing companies.
The financial position this year is extremely difficult … There is insufficient headroom to take on any additional commitments this year, and next year is also likely to be tight.
The cause of the problems at both Interlogic and ABB, and for passengers, is lack of investment. I asked the House of Commons Library to dig out the investment figures for me. Those show that in 1992–93, £1,556 million was invested in the railways. The following year, the figure fell to £1,263 million. The Department of Transport's press release on Budget day last November said that the Government intended to put only £750 million of taxpayers' money into the railways next year.
Unlike many hon. Members on both sides of the House, I have set up and run a business, so I know that if one invests, one improves the product and gains a market share whereas if one does not invest, the business goes into a spiral of decline.
Will the Minister now give me an answer to my written question on signalling? Will he place in the Library a copy of the Hesketh report so that we can see what was recommended? What future does he hold out for the 170 signalling engineers in my constituency who have been told that they will be made redundant? What prospect is there that the British Railways Board will decide to place a follow-on order with ABB carriage works within the next seven weeks, ahead of its threat of closing the York carriage works?

Mr. Tim Rathbone: Even in the remaining few moments of the debate, I do not believe that it can take place without reference to our late colleague, Robert Adley. He certainly would have been in his place tonight and producing some trenchant thoughts. In all probability they would not have been entirely in support of the Government, as they seldom were. I am sorry that he is not here.
Like Robert Adley, I have been entirely in favour of the denationalisation of British Rail; my only qualms relate to the Government's method and their approach. All the arguments from the Opposition have been met by the statement from my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, who has said that they are curable through the process of denationalisation. Soon may it come.
I believe in the infinite capacity of entrepreneurial activity to meet the requirements of any public user of a service. That is the case equally for the services of British Rail. My goodness, gracious me, such improvements to present services are needed in spades on Network SouthCentral, which travels down through my constituency, beginning with the Brighton line, on to Lewes, along to Eastbourne or down to the coast at Newhaven and Seaford. Passengers on that service have suffered from a diminishing service and a lessening of quality rolling stock for too long. They deserve better. For that reason I shall support the Government's amendment.
My one remaining qualm has to do with timing. The trouble with the plans as presented is that they will take a little time to execute. The trouble with that is that people who will benefit from improved services will not necessarily do so quickly enough to appreciate that the Government's plans are correct. [Interruption.] I hear cackles from the Opposition, but that just shows how little they care about improvements in service. They obviously consider that a worry about bringing those improvements in quickly enough is merely worthy of a cackle. I hope that the Minister will take note of my concern.
I hope that the Government will be able to introduce the improvements in services as a result of the denationalisation in time so that my constituents and others like them will benefit. The qualms that have been raised have been well identified in the final two lines of the Government's amendment, which
condemns Her Majesty's Opposition for continuing to rely on scare tactics as a substitute for policy which would enhance passenger services.
Those scare tactics have begun to stick not only from the Front Benches but from the Liberal Democrat Benches. There is a hardly a Liberal Democrat local council which has not sent up flak about worsening British Rail services, but the Liberals have no plans to improve them.
I promise the Government my support in the Lobby. My continuing hope is that the Government's plan for denationalisation will work, but that it is carried out with urgency.

Ms Glenda Jackson: Last week, the publication of the passenger service requirement by the franchising director was hailed by the Secretary of State for Transport as the first great advance for the passenger. He said:
Satisfying the aspirations of train passengers should be the heart of any policy for the railways.

It is the PSR that is supposed to satisfy those aspirations with contractual obligations to provide in certain instances less than a third of the services currently provided; a cut of 70 per cent. in some peak morning services and contracts which will allow operators to miss out services to stations currently served and make other stations optional.
No sooner had the PSR been published than the Secretary of State attempted to distance himself from it, as he did again tonight. He said that the PSR did not represent a timetable and the actual services to be provided.
The Government cannot have it both ways; either the PSR is the answer to rail passengers' prayers or it is not. Either the services that are contained within it are those that will actually be offered, or they are not. If they are, they represent the most savage attack on Britain's rail services since Beeching; if they are not, how on earth can they be described as a great advance for the rail passenger?
As the impact on services becomes apparent, Ministers attempt to reassure with warm, cosy words about every rail passenger's benevolent uncles, the rail regulator and the franchising director. We are reminded that their obligation to protect the interests of rail passengers are enshrined in statute. Yet every time the Rail Regulator or the franchising director makes a pronouncement, such as on minimum service levels or through ticketing, it is suddenly matched by a mad rush from Ministers to tell us that our benevolent uncles are proposing what will never actually happen. Indeed, in the case of the public service requirement, the Secretary of State disowned the proposals in the same speech in which he welcomed them. He added:
It is not for me, as Secretary of State, or even Roger Salmon, as the franchising director, to dictate the future timetable. That is for operators and Rai1track".
That is the bottom line of rail privatisation. Whatever assurances Ministers give, whatever safeguards they pledge to build into the system, the operators—or rather the market—will decide the level of service.
Despite what we have heard from the Conservative Benches about Labour scaremongering, I give Ministers the opportunity to put a stop to those scares once and for all. Will they guarantee that no rail service will be reduced to the limit outlined in the public service requirement? Will they guarantee that every station described as "optional" in the PSR document will continue to receive the level of service that it does currently? Above all, will they guarantee that the level of service provided nationally following privatisation will not be below that provided by the current timetable?
If Ministers cannot give those guarantees, rail passengers will continue to be scared by their privatisation proposals, and rightly so.

Mr. Brian Wilson: First, I associate myself with what my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Meacher) said at the start of his speech about the very sad circumstances that lead to my being in this position tonight, and I know that the thoughts of all of us are with the hon. Member for Fife, Central (Mr. McLcish), who otherwise would have been here.
The hon. Member for Lewes (Mr. Rathbone) is really too modest when he gives the Opposition all the credit for alerting people throughout the country to what is going on in the railways, and for the fact that millions of people—85 per cent. of the population, according to the latest opinion polls—do not wish their madcap scheme to be proceeded with. Of course the hon. Member for Lewes, 12 months or so ago, was one of those so-called Tory rebels who contributed greatly to that mood of awareness.
The tragedy is that the hon. Gentleman gave in. He did not obtain a single concession; the scheme that is going through now is as bad as, or worse than, what he opposed. Even the issue on which he supposedly took the Government to the line, the so-called "Peyton amendment" tabled in the House of Lords, which would give British Rail the right to compete to operate services—the minimum concession that the hon. Gentleman was prepared to vote for at the time—is now being denied by that creature, the franchising director, who has been created by the privatisation process.
The hon. Gentleman may have given in. He may now be starting to defend the proposals to his constituents, but he is too late, and I am delighted to say that to some extent his own handiwork has contributed to that.
Various hon. Members have spoken—those who read out Central Office briefs and those who read out their own important works of literature, such as the hon. Member for Croydon, South (Mr. Ottaway)—of all the wonderful successes of other privatisations. Most of that is nonsense. If we examined those claims in turn, they could be tested and found wanting.
However, Conservative Members do not understand or will not accept that, in one key respect, railway privatisation is different from every other industry that they have tried to privatise. The key respect is that the railways alone rely for their profitability on political decisions about the level of subsidy. If an industry is profitable, or capable of being made profitable, as all the others were, one might say that entrepreneurial flair can win the day, and we could argue about whether that has been true. However, the railways are different because, as in every other country, they depend on political decisions about subsidy.
That is why I believe that, ultimately, the whole enterprise is doomed to failure. The Government, in their last days, will be unable to give the assurances that any investor needs. That is why the process of debate is so important; it is to inform public opinion, to inform investor opinion and to make it absolutely clear that anyone who puts their money into the railways is putting it into a loser. That process is proceeding very satisfactorily.
What do we hear from Conservative Members tonight? They are right back where they started. The debate has passed them by. All they can do, with their little scripts, is stand up and denigrate British Rail. They did it when the White Paper came out; they did it on Second Reading; they did it in Committee; they have done it in every debate on the railways that has taken place when I have been in the House. Where does it leave them? It leaves them with 85 per cent. of public opinion opposed to railway privatisation. It leaves them with a better informed electorate, and a massive electoral millstone around their neck. Our message to the Government is: carry on. The Government will not manage to privatise the railways but, day after day, people learn what is

happening to the railways and they attribute it not just to privatisation, but to the fragmentation of the rail system and the absurdities that have been created in the name of political dogma. The electorate will punish the Government accordingly.
I stood at the Dispatch Box once before and said the same thing about another piece of legislation: the poll tax. The late Robert Adley made that very good analogy. Ultimately, the Government will have to abandon their privatisation plans or pay the political price. That is the choice that they faced over the poll tax and they will face it with the railways as well.
There have been a number of cameos tonight. The hon. Member for South Hams (Mr. Steen) is not, I fear, a potential member of Mensa. He seemed to believe that a different ticket collector inspected his ticket each time and that ticket collectors leaped on to overstaffed trains at every station. The hon. Gentleman is not with us at this stage of the evening, but his hon. Friends who are present might suggest gently that it was the same ticket collector.
The hon. Member for South Hams was very concerned—as all Tories are in these Eurosceptical days—about the fact that French wine and French water are served on the trains which speed their way to South Hams. In contrast, he cares nothing about the fact that thousands of jobs will be sacrificed in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for York (Mr. Bayley) or that another great British industry is being driven to the wall because, as a result of the Government's railway privatisation policy, we will soon lose the capacity to build trains in this country.
The Secretary of State for Transport has joined us and he shakes his head. Does he deny that 5,000 jobs were lost last year in the railway manufacturing industry as a result of the blight created by the Government's privatisation programme? He can argue with the captains of industry who manufacture trains and with ABB Transportation, which was brought into the country under false pretences. He can argue with the 5,000 workers who lost their jobs and with the 20,000 workers whose jobs are threatened. Despite all the warnings, the Government have not lifted a finger to ensure continuity of orders. That is why the railway manufacturing industry is on its knees.
The Tories care about French wine on British trains; we care about British jobs, British manufacturing and British potential to build trains. In future when the hon. Member for South Hams rides on trains which have been built in Korea or America instead of Britain I suppose that he will worry about the wine, but I hope that he will not be travelling on a Member of Parliament's rail warrant.
The real victims of the privatisation process include the 5,000 people who have lost their jobs in the manufacturing industry. They also include the many workers in York—that great centre of British manufacturing—who fear for their jobs because of the Government's policies and their privatisation programme.
To a large extent, we have talked about hypotheticals tonight; we have talked about what might or might not happen. Let us now talk about what has happened already. Perhaps the Minister who will reply to the debate will tell us about the abolition of the Motorail service. Although they pay lip service to environmental considerations, in 1995 the Government propose to abolish the motorail service.
Let us talk about the rail sleeper service—only two trains will be left out of the six which operate currently. Let us talk about the total loss of overnight passenger services. While Members of Parliament may travel south from Scotland in sleepers, tens of thousands of people pay a modest fare to travel in the passenger carriages at the back of the train. That service will be abolished; there is nothing hypothetical about that.
Let us address the realities and the question of consultation. Throughout the process, the Minister has talked about consultation as a precursor to service cuts. He has confirmed that that is correct, so I will move on to discuss consultation. The consultation takes the form of a press release from Mr. Salmon, stating that the services are to be withdrawn. He states:
I do not intend to include sleeper services from London to Carlisle and Fort William. I do not intend to include the Plymouth to Glasgow and Edinburgh sleeper services. It is not intended to include Motorail in the passenger service requirement.
Where is the consultation? The subsidy is being withdrawn from the services in May 1995.
In the Secretary of State's absence we found out a little more. As an exercise in duplicity, it rates pretty high, even by the Government's standards. The Minister's reply to the hon. Member for Ross, Cromarty and Skye (Mr. Kennedy) was that the services will be withdrawn in May because the subsidy has been taken away.

Dr. Mawhinney: No.

Mr. Wilson: Oh yes, that is what Mr. Salmon says. There is no subsidy. I wish that the Secretary of State would intervene and tell us they are not going to be withdrawn and, if so, why they are not going to be withdrawn in May. There is no point in sitting there smugly saying no if he cannot give us the information.
The intention is that the subsidies will be withdrawn in May, so the services will be withdrawn in May. However, the consultation process will be based on the minimum service specifications which will not be produced until after May. According to the correspondence quoted by the hon. Member for Ross, Cromarty and Skye, because the services have already been withdrawn, they will not form part of the specifications on which consultation will take place.
The services will not exist, therefore there will be no consultation on them. If that trick is being used to get rid of these rural services, it can be used to get rid of every rural service in Britain.
The message will go out from tonight's debate that that is the trick and the form of duplicity being entered into, and that if it can be used to destroy those services, it can be used on every other service.
I now understand why, in answer to questions tabled for reply today in which I asked Secretary of State in a very precise form of words
if he will instruct the Director of Rail Franchising to consult with the rail users' consultative committees, prior to withdrawal of subsidy in respect of Motorail services.".
I asked the same question in respect of those sleeper services that are to be withdrawn. It was a straightforward question—will he or will he not do that? His reply was:
I will answer these questions shortly.

Will he answer them now? Will there or will there not be consultation before the services are withdrawn? If there will not, every word that has been spoken about consultation is worthless and that message will go out to every rural area of Britain where the same tricks can be played.
I want to turn to the interesting reply given yesterday to hon. Member for Ross, Cromarty and Skye by the Secretary of State for Transport in regard to the sleeper service to Fort William. It is a specific question, but the principle is universal. He stated:
I must tell the hon. Gentleman that the taxpayers' subsidy per person for a sleeper berth on the trip to Fort William, excluding the infrastructure cost, is £180.
I do not believe that for a moment. The figure is rigged and if I had time I could tell the House why. Then comes the really interesting bit:
If one adds the cost of the infrastructure"—
that is the access charges to Railtrack—
the subsidy becomes £540."—[Official Report, 6 February 1995; Vol. 254, c. 12.]
According to even the Government's figures, everything else costs £180, but the access charges to Railtrack cost £360 per person.
There is no point in the Secretary of State shaking his head. If he is right tonight he was wrong yesterday. Those are the figures he gave. It is an interesting figure because the marginal cost of operating the services for Railtrack is virtually nil, yet they are imposing such a scale of charges upon those services as to make them ludicrously uneconomic. Again the message goes out and anyone who remembers the Beeching era will understand the message, that if figures can be rigged in this way for sleeper services, they will be rigged in future for every other service that they want rid of.
I challenge the Minister on another figure. If there are to be two sleeper services a night instead of six in each direction and at present the access charge for rail services is £17.5 million, one might imagine that the figure would be divided into three and that the access charges would be £5 million or £6 million. That is not so.
Can the Minister confirm that the access charges for two sleeper services as opposed to six will be £16.5 million? In other words, there is no saving to the operators. The access charges are to remain the same. The only difference is that those access charges will be spread over fewer trains and users so, as night follows day, in months or a couple of years from now, equally ludicrous figures will be produced in order to prove the impossibility of keeping such services going. Those are the tricks that are being played and the constituents of Conservative Members will know about it just as we do.
The ludicrous little booklet which contains a speech by the Secretary of State in which he tried to pre-empt public reaction on the passenger service requirement did not work because every journalist who looked at it saw through it and realised that nothing was being given but a great deal was being taken away.
How do we summarise the passenger service requirements? There will be 45 per cent. of the existing timetabled Gatwick express service but no early morning or late night services guaranteed. The current service of 46 trains from Swindon to London daily and 45 from London compares with a PSR of 36 trains to London and 30 from London. Who will speak for Swindon? The current


service of 55 trains from Reading to London and 58 from London compares with a PSR of 17 trains each way. Who will speak for Reading? The current service of six trains daily from Penzance to London compares with a PSR of four trains daily. Who will speak for Cornwall?

Mr. Paul Tyler: rose—

Mr. Wilson: I am sorry, I cannot give way. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will speak for Cornwall. The Labour party will speak for Cornwall, but there is no Tory Member here tonight to speak for Cornwall or to defend its services against these cuts. The current service of five fast trains an hour in the peak period from Basingstoke to London and three fast trains an hour off peak compares with a PSR of two fast trains an hour to London. Who will speak for Basingstoke?
Basildon—where is the little man who usually jumps up when Basildon is mentioned? The current service of six trains an hour in the peak period from Basildon to London and four trains an hour off peak compares with a PSR of three trains an hour in the peak period and two trains off peak. Who will speak for Basildon? We will speak for Basildon and for every other community that is affected by these cuts.
Public opinion is against the policy. The natural majority in the House is against it. The more people understand it, the more they are opposed to it. It is a madcap scheme. According to the Government's own predictions, it allows from 1997–98 onwards a £600 million profit for the private sector. That goes to the question of what Labour would do. While support for the railway system drops consistently, £600 million is to be creamed off by private operators. The question is not whether we renationalise the railways but whether the country can afford a privatised railway service, and the answer is that it cannot.

The Minister for Railways and Roads (Mr. John Watts): The House will have noted that the hon. Member for Cunninghame, North (Mr. Wilson) did not answer the question whether the Labour party, if it were ever in Government, would wish to renationalise the railway system.
I am surprised and disappointed that, despite the efforts of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and my own, Opposition Members have neither learnt their lessons well nor done their homework properly. Faced with the simple question, "What is a passenger service requirement?" they resort to the schoolboy's answer, "Not taught yet." Let me try again.
A passenger service requirement is not a timetable. It is based on the existing timetable, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr. Freeman), the former Minister for Public Transport, explained at the end of the Second Reading debate on the Railways Bill two years and five days ago. A PSR is a guaranteed level of service for rail passengers and a contractual obligation on a train operator to provide at least that level of service.
A PSR ensures that every route and every destination is covered. The greater the commercial viability of a service, the more likely the obligation will be specified to maximise the scope to respond to passengers' needs. The greater the social need for a service and the more it is dependent on subsidy, the more closely the specification will follow the levels of service in the current timetable.
The hon. Member for Streatham (Mr. Hill) is simply wrong in his assertion that non-franchise services, those that are still waiting to be franchised at any time, will be starved of funds.
The principles that I have outlined are, of course, reflected in the first four PSRs announced by the franchising director last week. Opposition Members are transfixed by minima. The hon. Member for Streatham was a good example of that. They cannot believe that anyone in the private sector would choose to do more than the bare minimum that he or she is obliged to do. I understand their dilemma. It stems from their political philosophy. The Labour party is the party of the lowest common denominator. All that it understands is levelling down. The work-to-rule mentality of its trade union mentors permeates of its thinking.
My difficulty is that we do not yet have private sector operators of passenger train networks, although, of course, my hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley (Mr. Riddick) was right to draw attention to the increasing role of charter operators. We do, of course, have evidence of the attitudes of the directors of the British Rail train operating units, who have adapted with great enthusiasm to the greater freedoms that restructuring has already provided. My hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (Mr. Key) commented on that. As he said, railway nostalgia will not do. Those who are running the railways are looking forward, not backwards, and are developing services to meet the needs of their customers.

Mr. Home Robertson: Will the Minister give way?

Mr. Watts: I have very little time, and there are many points that I wish to cover, so I am afraid that I cannot give way.
Each of the train operating units has negotiated track access rights to operate more services than those that are included even in the current timetable. My hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley was absolutely right: British Airways does not need to be forced to run services or offer inter-available tickets. It does those things because it makes commercial sense. It is a way in which it can make money. He and my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, South (Mr. Ottaway) cited other instances of privatisation bringing improved services. Why should privatisation of the railways have any different outcome?
The hon. Member for Cunninghame, North (Mr. Wilson) referred to the position of Scottish sleeper services, as did the hon. Members for Ross, Cromarty and Skye (Mr. Kennedy) and for Cunninghame, South (Mr. Donohoe). They spoke as though there had been no consultation whatever. Yet if they have seen the letter from Mr. Salmon to the convener of Highland regional council, they will know—[Interruption.] I have a copy of it here. The letter explains:
Following meetings in Scotland with local conveners, the rail users consultative committee for Scotland and the convention of Scottish local authorities, I decided that the best course of action was for OPRAF to be as open as possible about our policy intentions at the earliest opportunity. To delay an announcement until the consultation process for ScotRail was under way would have meant many months of further uncertainty.

Mr. Charles Kennedy: I thank the Minister for giving way and would like to give him an opportunity, which I gave earlier but which he did not take up, to clarify his thinking and that of the Secretary of State on the adverse


comments by the chairman of the Central Rail Users Consultative Committee. Does the Minister back the plea made to Mr. Salmon by the chairman of the RUCC?

Mr. Watts: The chairman of the RUCC is making his views known. That is part of the consultation process. The House established those consultative committees to fulfil that role.
It will be perfectly clear that the allegation that there has been no consultation is false. As I explained earlier, in an intervention—

Mr. Wilson: Will the Minister give way?

Mr. Watts: No. I cannot now. I have seven minutes left.

Mr. Wilson: rose—

Mr. Watts: I am not giving way, Madam Speaker. [Interruption.] As I explained to the hon. Member for Ross, Cromarty and Skye, the publication of the PSR for ScotRail will provide an opportunity for consultation in the formal sense between the local authorities and all those other bodies. The hon. Member for Cunninghame, North, in winding up—

Mr. Wilson: Will the Minister give way?

Hon. Members: Sit down.

Madam Speaker: Order. I shall deal with this matter. Is the Minister giving way?

Mr. Watts: No, Madam Speaker.
The hon. Gentleman, when winding up, referred to services to Reading. I appreciate the difficulty that Opposition Members—and, indeed, some journalists—have in understanding the PSR for services to Reading. It is couched in terms similar to those of an 11-plus verbal reasoning test question—the sort in which John is younger than Margaret but wiser than Tony; hon. Members will know the sort of question that I mean.
The PSR specifies an hourly service with at least 17 trains daily and 10 arrivals at Paddington between 7.30 am and 9.15 am. Elementary arithmetic leads us to the conclusion that at least 25 trains will be needed to meet that minimum requirement. In fact, Great Western Trains is likely to maintain a much more substantial service, not for reasons of altruism but to make money—yes, to make a profit.
The hon. Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Meacher) and others posed a question that has been posed many times before: why not make the current timetable the passenger service requirement? If he listened to what was said by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, he will now know the pattern of services and the way in which it is to be specified in the PSR.
PSRs for commuter services on London-TilburySouthend trains, and on south-west trains, do not allow services to be decimated, as has been alleged, but will oblige operators to run at least 90 per cent. of trains on the current timetable to meet the frequency requirements, as well as additional trains in peak periods to limit overcrowding. Those two elements provide a much better guarantee of a decent service than the fossilisation of the current timetable that "old Labour" wants.
The hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody) mentioned rumours of heavy cuts in services this May. They are rumours—just that—with no foundation in fact. Opposition Members should not believe everything they read in newspapers, especially stories that seek to gain credibility by claiming to be leaks of confidential documents. The directors of the four train operating units whose PSRs were announced last week have made it clear that they intend no reduction in services; on the contrary, they are looking for opportunities to expand services further.
My hon. Friend the Member for South Hams (Mr. Steen) made an excellent speech, painting a graphic word picture of services in the west country. He does not want to preserve current services; his expectation, which I share, is that the private sector will improve services rather than impairing them. He was also able to claim some credit for scotching the evil rumour that the Penzance sleeper service was under attack.
My hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Mr. Rathbone) asked whether the benefits would come quickly enough. He will know that Network SouthCentral is likely to be included in the next tranche of franchises to be announced later this year, and I assure him that we shall try to ensure that the benefits of franchising are introduced as rapidly as possible.
I confessed earlier that I was unable to give an example of private operators running passenger train networks, but I can give another example of the benefits of transport privatisation. The National Express coach is a familiar sight on our motorways. National Express was a subsidiary of the National Bus Company created by a Labour Government in 1968; in March 1988 it was privatised by sale to its management. Since privatisation, it has expanded its network to 180 routes, serving 1,200 destinations and carrying 10.5 million passengers. It did not achieve that success by paring down its services or ignoring the needs of its passengers.
On 24 November last year I went to Liverpool to open a new purpose-built coach station. National Express had noticed that its business in Liverpool had declined since the closure of the old coach station. Some of its customers, including the Merseyside pensioners' association, had mounted a vigorous campaign for a new coach station. It was in response to customers' demands that the new coach station was planned and built, and I had the pleasure of opening it. I understand that passenger numbers increased, even in expectation that the station would be built.
Perhaps Opposition Members will now understand why I have confidence in the ability of the private sector to respond to passengers' needs, and why I believe that private rail operators will build their businesses by extending their services, not by cutting them.

Question put, That the original words stand part of the Question:—

The House divided: Ayes 265, Noes 302.

Division No. 66]
[10.00 pm


AYES


Abbott, Ms Diane
Anderson, Ms Janet (Ros'dale)


Ainger, Nick
Armstrong, Hilary


Ainsworth, Robert (Cov'try NE)
Ashdown, Rt Hon Paddy


Allen, Graham
Ashton, Joe


Alton, David
Austin-Walker, John


Anderson, Donald (Swansea E)
Banks, Tony (Newham NW)






Barnes, Harry
Fyfe, Maria


Barron, Kevin
Galbraith, Sam


Battle, John
Galloway, George


Bayley, Hugh
Gapes, Mike


Beckett, Rt Hon Margaret
George, Bruce


Beith, Rt Hon A J
Gerrard, Neil


Bell, Stuart
Gilbert, Rt Hon Dr John


Benn, Rt Hon Tony
Godman, Dr Norman A


Bennett, Andrew F
Godsiff, Roger


Bermingham, Gerald
Golding, Mrs Llin


Berry, Roger
Gordon, Mildred


Betts, Clive
Grant Bernie (Tottenham)


Blunkett, David
Griffiths, Nigel (Edinburgh S)


Boateng, Paul
Griffiths, Win (Bridgend)


Boyes, Roland
Grocott, Bruce


Bradley, Keith
Gunned, John


Bray, Dr Jererny
Hall, Mike


Brown, Gordon (Dunfemline E)
Hanson, David


Brown, N (N'c'tle upon Tyne E)
Hardy, Peter


Bruce, Malcolm (Gordon)
Harman, Ms Harriet


Burden, Richard
Hattersley, Rt Hon Roy


Byers, Stephen
Henderson, Doug


Caborn, Richard
Heppell, John


Callaghan, Jim
Hill, Keith (Streatham)


Campbell, Mrs Anne (C'bridge)
Hinchliffe, David


Campbell, Menzies (Fife NE)
Hodge, Margaret


Campbell, Ronnie (Blyth V)
Hoey, Kate


Campbell-Savours, D N
Hogg, Norman (Cumbernauld)


Caravan, Dennis
Home Robertson, John


Cann, Jamie
Hood, Jimmy


Chidgey, David
Hoon, Geoffrey


Chisholm, Malcolm
Howarth, George (Knowsley North)


Church, Judith
Howells, Dr. Kim (Pontypridd)


Clapham, Michael
Hughes, Kevin (Doncaster N)


Clark, Dr David (South Shields)
Hughes, Robert (Aberdeen N)


Clarke, Tom (Monklands W)
Hughes, Roy (Newport E)


Clelland, David
Hughes, Simon (Southwark)


Clwyd, Mrs Ann
Hutton, John


Coffey, Ann
Illsley, Eric


Cohen, Harry
Ingram, Adam


Connarty, Michael
Jackson, Glenda (H'stead)


Corbett, Robin
Jackson, Helen (Sheild, H)


Corbyn, Jeremy
Jamieson, David


Corston, Jean
Janner, Grevile


Cousins, Jim
Johnston, Sir Russell


Cox, Tom
Jones, Barry (Alyn and D'side)


Cummings, John
Jones, Ieuan Wyn (Ynys Mon)


Cunliffe, Lawrence
Jones, Lynne (B'ham S O)


Cunningham, Jim (Covy SE)
Jones, Martyn (Ctwyd, SW)


Dalyell, Tarn
Jones, Nigel (Cheltenham)


Darling, Alistair
Jowel, Tessa


Davies, Bryan (Oldham C'tral)
Kaufman, Rt Hon Gerald


Davies, Rt Hon Denzil (Llanelli)
Keen, Alan


Davies, Ron (Caerphilly)
Kennedy, Charles (Ross,C&S)


Davis, Terry (B'ham, H'dge H'I)
Kennedy, Jane (Lpool Brdgn)


Denham, John
Khabra, Piara S


Dewar, Donald
Kilfoyle, Peter


Dixon, Don
Kirkwood, Archy


Dobson, Frank
Lestor, Joan (Eccles)


Donohoe, Brian H
Lewis, Terry


Dowd, Jim
Liddell, Mrs Helen


Dunnachie, Jimmy
Litherland, Robert


Dunwoody, Mrs Gwyneth
Livingstone, Ken


Eagle, Ms Angela
Lloyd, Tony (Stratford)


Eastham, Ken
Llwyd, Elfyn


Enright, Derek
Loyden, Eddie


Etherington, Bill
Lynne, Ms Liz


Evans, John (St Helens N)
McAllion, John


Ewing, Mrs Margaret
McAvoy, Thomas


Fatchett, Derek
McCartney, Ian


field, Frank (Birkenhead)
Macdonald, Calum


Fisher, Mark
McFall,John


Flynn, Paul
McKelvey, William


Foster, Rt Hon Derek
Mackinlay, Andrew


Foster, Don (Bath)
McMaster, Gordon


Fraser, John
McNamara, Kevin





MacShane, Denis
Rooker, Jeff


McWilliam.John
Rooney, Terry


Madden, Max
Ross, Ernie (Dundee W)


Maddock, Diana
Rowlands, Ted


Mahon, Alice
Ruddock, Joan


Mandelson, Peter
Sedgemore, Brian


Marek, DrJohn
Sheerman, Barry


Marshall, David (Shettleston)
Sheldon, Rt Hon Robert


Marshall, Jim (Leicester, S)
Shore, Rt Hon Peter


Martin, Michael J (Springburn)
Short, Clare


Martlew, Eric
Simpson, Alan


Maxton, John
Skinner, Dennis


Meacher, Michael
Smith, Andrew (Oxford E)


Meale, Alan
Smith, Chris (Isl'ton S & F'sbury)


Michael, Alun
Smith, Liew (Blaenau Gwent)


Michie, Bill (Sheffield Heeley)
Snape, Peter


Michie, Mrs Ray (Argyll & Bute)
Soley, Clive


Milburn, Alan
Spearing, Nigel


Miller, Andrew
Spellar, John


Mitchell, Austin (Gt Grimsby)
Squire, Rachel (Dunfermline W)


Moonie, Dr Lewis
Steel, Rt Hon Sir David


Morris, Rt Hon Alfred (Wy'nshawe)
Steinberg, Gerry


Morris, Estelle (B'ham Yardley)
Stevenson, George


Morris, Rt Hon John (Aberavon)
Stott, Roger


Mudie, George
Strang, Dr. Gavin


Mullin, Chris
Straw, Jack


Oakes. Rt Hon Gordon
Sutcliffe, Gerry


O'Brien, Mike (N W'kshire)
Taylor, Mrs Ann (Dewsbury)


olner Bill
Taylor, Matthew (Truro)


O'Neill, Martin
Thompson, Jack (Wansbeck)


Orme, Rt Hon Stanley
Timms, Stephen


Parry, Robert
Tipping, Paddy



Turner, Dennis


Patchett, Terry
Tyler Paul


Pearson, Ian
Vaz, Keith


Pendry, Tom
Walker, Rt Hon Sir Harold


Pickthall, Colin
Wallace, James


Pike, Peter L
Walley, Joan


Pope, Greg
Wardell, Gareth (Gower)


Powell, Ray (Ogmore)
Wareing, Robert N


Prentice, Bridget (Lew'm E)
Wicks, Malcolm


Prentice, Gordon (Pendle)
Wigley, Dafydd


Prescott, Rt Hon John
Williams, Rt Hon Alan (SW'n W)


Primarolo, Dawn
Williams, Alan W (Carmarthen)


Quin, Ms Joyce
Wilson, Brian


Raynsford, Nick
Wise, Audrey


Redmond, Martin
Worthington, Tony


Reid, Dr John
Wray, Jimmy


Rendel, David
Young, David (Bolton SE)


Robertson, George (Hamilton)



Robinson, Geoffrey (Co'try NW)
Tellers for the Ayes:


Roche, Mrs Barbara
Mr. Joe Benton and Mr. Eric Clarke.


Rogers, Allan





NOES


Ainsworth, Peter (East Surrey)
Bendall, Vivian


Aitken, Rt Hon Jonathan
Beresford, Sir Paul


Alexander, Richard
Body, Sir Richard


Alison, Rt Hon Michael (Selby)
Bonsor, Sir Nicholas


Allason, Rupert (Torbay)
Booth, Hartley


Amess, David
Boswell, Tim


Ancram, Michael
Bottomley, Peter (Eltham)


Arbuthnot, James
Bottomley, Rt Hon Virginia


Arnold, Jacques (Gravesham)
Bowden, Sir Andrew


Arnold, Sir Thomas (Hazel Grv)
Bowis, John


Ashby, David
Boyson, Rt Hon Sir Rhodes


Atkins, Robert
Brandreth, Gyles


Atkinson, David (Bour'mouth E)
Brazier, Julian


Atkinson, Peter (Hexham)
Bright, Sir Graham


Baker, Nicholas (North Dorset)
Brooke, Rt Hon Peter


Baldry, Tony
Brown, M (Brigg & Cl'thorpes)


Banks, Matthew (Southport)
Browning, Mrs Angela


Banks, Robert (Harrogate)
Bruce, Ian (Dorset)


Bates, Michael
Budgen, Nicholas


Batiste, Spencer
Burns, Simon


Bellingham, Henry
Burt, Altstair






Butcher, John
Hampson, Dr Keith


Butler, Peter
Hanley, Rt Hon Jeremy


Butterfill, John
Hannam, Sir John


Carlisle, John (Luton North)
Hargreaves, Andrew


Carlisle, Sir Kenneth (Lincoln)
Harris, David


Carrington, Matthew
Haselhurst, Alan


Carttiss, Michael
Hawkins, Nick


Cash.William
Hawksley, Warren


Channon, Rt Hon Paul
Hayes, Jerry


Churchill, Mr
Heald, Oliver


clappison, James
Heath, Rt Hon Sir Edward


Clark, Dr Michael (Rochford)
Heathcoat-Amory, David


Clarke, Rt Hon Kenneth (Ru'clif)
Hendry, Charles


Clifton-Brown, Geoffrey
Hicks, Robert


Colvin, Michael
Higgins, Rt Hon Sir Terence


Congdon, David
Hill, James (Southampton Test)


Conway, Derek
Horam.John


Coombs, Anthony (Wyre For'st)
Hordem, Rt Hon Sir Peter


Coombs, Simon (Swindon)
Howard, Rt Hon Michael


Cope, Rt Hon Sir John
Howarth, Alan (Strat'rd-on-A)


Couchman, James
Howell, Rt Hon David (G'dford)


Cran, James
Howell, Sir Ralph (N Norfolk)


Currie, Mrs Edwina (S D'by'ire)
Hughes, Robert G (Harrow W)


Curry, David (Skipton & Ripon)
Hunt, Rt Hon David (Wirral W)


Davies, Quentin (Stamford)
Hunt, Sir John (Ravensbourne)


Davis, David (Boothferry)
Hunter, Andrew


Day, Stephen
Jack, Michael


Deva, Nirj Joseph
Jackson, Robert (Wantage)


Dicks, Terry
Jenkin, Bernard


Dorrel, Rt Hon Stephen
Jessel, Toby


Douglas-Hamilton, Lord James
Johnson Smith, Sir Geoffrey


Dover, Den
Jones, Gwilym (Cardiff N)


Duncan, Alan
Jones, Robert B (W Hertfdshr)


Duncan Smith, Iain
Jopling, Rt Hon Michael


Dunn, Bob
Kellett-Bowman, Dame Elaine


Durant, Sir Anthony
Key, Robert


Dykes, Hugh
Kilfedder, Sir James


Elletson, Harold
King, Rt Hon Tom


Emery, Rt Hon Sir Peter
Knapman, Roger


Evans, David (Welwyn Hatfield)
Knight Mrs Angela (Erewash)


Evans, Jonathan (Brecon)
Knight, Greg (Derby N)


Evans, Nigel (Ribble Valley)
Knight, Dame Jill (Bir'm E'st'n)


Evans, Roger (Monmouth)
Knox, Sir David


Evennett, David
Kynoch, George (Kincardine)


Faber, David
Lait, Mrs Jacqui


Fabricant, Michael
Lamont, Rt Hon Norman


Fenner, Dame Peggy
Lang, Rt Hon Ian


Field, Barry (Isle of Wight)
Lawrence, Sir Ivan


Fishburn, Dudley
Legg, Barry


Forman, Nigel
Leigh, Edward


Forth, Eric
Lennox-Boyd, Sir Mark


Fowler, Rt Hon Sir Norman
Lester, Jim (Broxtowe)


Fox, Dr Liam (Woodspring)
Lidington, David


Fox, Sir Marcus (Shipley)
Lightbown, David


Freeman, Rt Hon Roger
Lloyd, Rt Hon Sir Peter (Fareham)


French, Douglas
Lord, Michael


Fry, Sir Peter
Luff, Peter


Gale, Roger
Lyell, Rt Hon Sir Nicholas


Gallie, Phil
MacGregor, Rt Hon John


Garel-Jones, Rt Hon Tristan
MacKay, Andrew


Garnier, Edward
Maclean, David


Gill, Christopher
McLoughlin, Patrick


Gillan, Cheryl
McNair-Wilson, Sir Patrick


Goodlad, Rt Hon Alastair
Madel, Sir David


Goodson-Wickes, Dr Charles
Maitland, Lady Olga


Gorman, Mrs Teresa
Malone, Gerald


Gorst, Sir John
Mans, Keith


Grant,Sir A (SW Cambs)
Marland, Paul


Greenway, Harry (Ealing N)
Marlow, Tony


Greenway, John (Ryedale)
Marshall, John (Hendon S)


Griffiths, Peter (Portsmouth, N)
Marshall, Sir Michael (Arundel)


Grylls, Sir Michael
Martin, David (Portsmouth S)


Gummer, Rt Hon John Selwyn
Mates, Michael


Hague, William
Mawhinney, Rt Hon Dr Brian


Hamilton, Rt Hon Sir Archibald
Mellor, Rt Hon David


Hamilton, Neil (Tatton)
Merchant, Piers





Mills, Iain
Spicer, Sir James (W Dorset)


Mitchell, Andrew (Gedlling)
Spicer, Michael (S Worcs)


Mitchell, Sir David (NW Hants)
Spring, Richard


Moate, Sir Roger
Sproat Iain


Monro, Sir Hector
Squire, Robin (Hornchurch)


Montgomery, Sir Fergus
Stanley, Rt Hon Sir John


Nelson, Anthony
Steen, Anthony


Neubert, Sir Michael
Stephen, Michael


Newton, Rt Hon Tony
Stern, Michael


Nicholls, Patrick
Stewart, Allan


Nicholson, David (Taunton)
Streeter, Gary


Nicholson, Emma (Devon West)
Sumberg, David


Norris, Steve
Sweeney, Walter


Onslow, Rt Hon SirCranley
Tapsell, Sir Peter


Ottaway, Richard
Taylor, Ian (Esher)


Page, Richard
Taylor, John M (Solihull)


Paice, James
Taylor, Sir Teddy (Southend, E)


Patnick, Sir Irvine
Temple-Morris, Peter


Patten, Rt Hon John
Thomason, Roy


Pattie, Rt Hon Sir Geoffrey
Thompson, Sir Donald (C'er V)


Pawsey, James
Thompson, Patrick (Norwich N)


Peacock, Mrs Elizabeth
Thurnham, Peter


Pickles, Eric
Townend, John (Bridlington)


Porter, Barry (Wirral S)
Townsend, Cyril D (Bexl'yh'th)


Porter, David (Waveney)
Tracey, Richard


Portillo, Rt Hon Michael
Tredirnnick, David


Powell, William (Corby)
Trend, Michael


Rathbone,Tim
Trotter, Neville


Redwood, Rt Hon John
Twinn, Dr Ian


Renton, Rt Hon Tim
Vaughan, Sir Gerard


Richards, Rod
Viggers, Peter


Riddick, Graham
Waldegrave, Rt Hon William


Rifkind, Rt Hon Malcolm
Walden, George


Robathan, Andrew
Walker, Bill (N Tayside)


Roberts, Rt Hon Sir Wyn
Waller, Gary


Robertson, Raymond (Ab'd'n S)
Ward, John


Robinson, Mark (Somerton)
Wardle, Charles (Bexhill)


Rowe, Andrew (Mid Kent)
Waterson, Nigel


Rumbold, Rt Hon Dame Angela
Watts, John


Ryder, Rt Hon Richard
Wells, Bowen


Sackville, Tom
Whitney, Ray


Sainsbury, Rt Hon Sir Timothy
Whittingdale, John


Scott, Rt Hon Sir Nicholas
Widdecombe, Ann


Shaw, David (Dover)
Wiggin, Sir Jerry


Shaw, Sir Giles (Pudsey)
Willetts, David


Shephard, Rt Hon Gillian
Wilshire, David


Shepherd, Colin (Hereford)
Winterton, Mrs Ann (Congleton)


Shepherd, Richard (Aldridge)
Winterton, Nicholas (Macc'fld)


Shersby, Michael
Wolfson, Mark


Sims, Roger
Wood, Timothy


Skeet, Sir Trevor
Yeo, Tim


Smith, Sir Dudley (Warwick)
Young, Rt Hon Sir George


Smith, Tim (Beaconsfield)



Soames, Nicholas
Tellers for the Noes:


Speed, Sir Keith
Mr. Sidney Chapman and Mr. Timothy Kirkhope.


Spencer, Sir Derek

Question accordingly negatived.

Question,That the proposed words be there added,put forthwith pursuand to Standing Order No.30(Questions on amendments):-

The House divided:Ayes 295,Noes 263.

Division No. 67]
[10.15 pm


AYES


Ainsworth, Peter (East Surrey)
Day, Stephen


Aitken, Rt Hon Jonathan
Deva, Nirj Joseph


Alexander, Richard
Dicks, Terry


Alison, Rt Hon Michael (Selby)
Dorrell, Rt Hon Stephen


Allason, Rupert (Torbay)
Douglas-Hamilton, Lord James


Amess, David
Dover, Den


Ancram, Michael
Duncan, Alan


Arbuthnot, James
Duncan Smith, Iain


Arnold, Jacques (Gravesham)
Dunn, Bob


Arnold, Sir Thomas (Hazel Grv)
Durant, Sir Anthony


Ashby, David
Dykes, Hugh


Atkins, Robert
Elletson, Harold


Atkinson, David (Bour'mouth E)
Emery, Rt Hon Sir Peter


Atkinson, Peter (Hexham)
Evans, David (Welwyn Hatfield)


Baker, Nicholas (North Dorset)
Evans, Jonathan (Brecon)


Baldry, Tony
Evans, Nigel (Ribble Valley)


Banks, Matthew (Southport)
Evans, Roger (Monmouth)


Banks, Robert (Harrogate)
Evennett, David


Bates, Michael
Faber, David


Batiste, Spencer
Fabricant, Michael


Bellingham, Henry
Fenner, Dame Peggy


Bendall, Vivian
Field, Barry (Isle of Wight)


Beresford, Sir Paul
Fishburn, Dudley


Bonsor, Sir Nicholas
Forman, Nigel


Booth, Hartley
Forth, Eric


Boswell, Tim
Fowler, Rt Hon Sir Norman


Bottomley, Peter (Eltham)
Fox, Sir Marcus (Shipley)


Bottomley, Rt Hon Virginia
Freeman, Rt Hon Roger


Bowden, Sir Andrew
French, Douglas


Bowis, John
Fry, Sir Peter


Boyson, Rt Hon Sir Rhodes
Gale, Roger


Brandreth, Gyles
Gallie, Phil


Brazier, Julian
GarelJones, Rt Hon Tristan


Bright Sir Graham
Garnier, Edward


Brooke, Rt Hon Peter
Gill, Christopher


Brown, M (Brigg & Cl'thorpes)
Gillan, Cheryl


Browning, Mrs Angela
Goodlad, Rt Hon Alastair


Bruce, Ian (Dorset)
Goodson-Wickes, Dr Charles


Budgen, Nicholas
Gorman, Mrs Teresa


Burns, Simon
Gorst, Sir John


Burt, Alistair
Grant, Sir A (SW Cambs)


Butcher, John
Greenway, Harry (Ealing N)


Butler, Peter
Greenway, John (Ryedale)


Butterfill, John
Griffiths, Peter (Portsmouth, N)


Carlisle, John (Luton North)
Gummer, Rt Hon John Selwyn


Carlisle, Sir Kenneth (Lincoln)
Hague, William


Carrington, Matthew
Hamilton, Rt Hon Sir Archibald


Carttiss, Michael
Hamilton, Neil (Tatton)


Cash, William
Hampson.Dr Keith


Channon, Rt Hon Paul
Hanley, Rt Hon Jeremy


Chapman, Sydney
Hannam, Sir John


Churchill, Mr
Hargreaves, Andrew


Clappison, James
Harris, David


Clark, Dr Michael (Rochford)
Haselhurst Alan


Clarke, Rt Hon Kenneth (Ru'clif)
Hawkins, Nick


Clifton-Brown, Geoffrey
Hawksley, Warren


Congdon, David
Hayes, Jerry


Conway, Derek
Heald, Oliver


Coombs, Anthony (Wyre For'st)
Heath, Rt Hon Sir Edward


Coombs, Simon (Swindon)
Heathcoat-Amory, David


Cope, Rt Hon Sir John
Hendry, Charles


Couchman, James
Hicks, Robert


Cran, James
Higgins, Rt Hon Sir Terence


Currie, Mrs Edwina (S D'byire)
Hill, James (Southampton Test)


Curry, David (Skipton & Ripon)
Horam, John


Davies, Quentin (Stamford)
Hordern, Rt Hon Sir Peter


Davis, David (Boothferry)
Howard, Rt Hon Michael





Howarth, Alan (Strat'rd-on-A)
Peacock, Mrs Elizabeth


Howell, Rt Hon David (G'dford)
Pickles, Eric


Howell, Sir Ralph (N Norfolk)
Porter, Barry (Wirral S)


Hughes, Robert G (Harrow W)
Porter, David (Waveney)


Hunt, Rt Hon David (Wirral W)
Portillo, Rt Hon Michael


Hunt, Sir John (Ravensbourne)
Powell, William (Corby)


Hunter, Andrew
Rathbone, Tim


Jack, Michael
Redwood, Rt Hon John


Jackson, Robert (Wantage)
Renton, Rt Hon Tim


Jenkin, Bernard
Richards, Rod


Jessel, Toby
Riddick, Graham


Johnson Smith, Sir Geoffrey
Rifkind, Rt Hon Malcolm


Jones, Gwilym (Cardiff N)
Robathan, Andrew


Jones, Robert B (W Hertfdshr)
Roberts, Rt Hon Sir Wyn


Jopling, Rt Hon Michael
Robertson, Raymond (Ab'd'n S)


Key, Robert
Robinson, Mark (Somerton)


Kilfedder, Sir James
Rowe, Andrew (Mid Kent)


King, Rt Hon Tom
Ryder, Rt Hon Richard


Knapman, Roger
Sackville, Tom


Knight, Mrs Angela (Erewash)
Sainsbury, Rt Hon Sir Timothy


Knight, Greg (Derby N)
Scott, Rt Hon Sir Nicholas


Knox, Sir David
Shaw, David (Dover)


Kynoch, George (Khcardine)
Shaw, Sir Giles (Pudsey)


Lait, Mrs Jacqui
Shephard, Rt Hon Gillian


Lamont, Rt Hon Norman
Shepherd, Colin (Hereford)


Lang, Rt Hon Ian
Shersby, Michael


Lawrence, Sir Ivan
Sims, Roger


Legg, Barry
Skeet, Sir Trevor


Leigh, Edward
Smith, Sir Dudley (Warwick)


Lennox-Boyd, Sir Mark
Smith, Tim (Beaconsfield)


Lester, Jim (Broxtowe)
Soames, Nicholas


Lidington, David
Speed, Sir Keith


Lightbown, David
Spencer, Sir Derek


Lloyd, Rt Hon Sir Peter (Fareham)
Spicer, Sir James (W Dorset)


Lord, Michael
Spicer, Michael (S Worcs)


Luff, Peter
Spring, Richard


Lyell, Rt Hon Sir Nicholas
Sproat, Iain


MacGregor, Rt Hon John
Squire, Robin (Homchurch)


MacKay, Andrew
Stanley, Rt Hon Sir John


Maclean, David
Steen, Anthony


McLoughlin, Patrick
Stephen, Michael


McNair-Wilson, Sir Patrick
Stern, Michael


Madel, Sir David
Stewart, Allan


Maitland, Lady Olga
Streeter, Gary


Malone, Gerald
Sumberg, David


Mans, Keith
Sweeney, Walter


Marland, Paul
Tapsell, Sir Peter


Marlow, Tony
Taylor, Ian (Esher)


Marshall, John (Hendon S)
Taylor, John M (Solihull)


Marshall, Sir Michael (Arundel)
Taylor, Sir Teddy (Southend, E)


Martin, David (Portsmouth S)
Temple-Morris, Peter


Mates, Michael
Thomason, Roy


Mawhinney, Rt Hon Dr Brian
Thompson, Sir Donald (C'er V)


Mellor, Rt Hon David
Thompson, Patrick (Norwich N)


Merchant Piers
Thurnham, Peter


Mills, Iain
Townend, John (Bridlington)


Mitchel, Andrew (Gedling)
Townsend, Cyril D (Baxl'yh'th)


Mitchell, Sir David (NW Hants)
Tracey, Richard


Moate, Sir Roger
Trednnick, David


Monro, Sir Hector
Trend, Michael


Montgomery, Sir Fergus
Trotter, Neville


Nelson, Anthony
Twim, Dr Ian


Neubert, Sir Michael
Vaughan, Sir Gerard


Newton, Rt Hon Tony
Viggers, Peter


Nicholls, Patrick
Waldegrave. Rt Hon William


Nicholson, David (Taunton)
Walden, George


Nicholson, Emma (Devon West)
Walker, Bill (N Tayside)


Norris, Steve
Waller, Gary


Onslow, Rt Hon Sir Cranley
Ward, John


Ottaway, Richard
Wardle, Charles (Bexhill)


Page, Richard
Waterson, Nigel


Paice, James
Watts, John


Patnick, Sir Irvine
Wells, Bowen


Patten, Rt Hon John
Whitney, Ray


Pattie, Rt Hon Sir Geoffrey
Whittingdale, John


Pawsey, James
Widdecombe, Ann






Wiggin, Sir Jerry
Wood, Timothy


Willetts, David
Yeo,Tim


Wilshire, David
Young, Rt Hon Sir George


Winterton, Mrs Ann (Congleton)
Tellers for the Ayes:


Winterton, Nicholas (Macc'f'ld)
Mr. Timothy Kirkhope and Dr. Llam Fox.


Wolfson, Mark





NOES


Abbott, Ms Diane
Denham, John


Ainger, Nick
Dewar, Donald


Ainsworth, Robert (Cov'try NE)
Dixon, Don


Allen, Graham
Dobson, Frank


Alton, David
Donohoe, Brian H


Anderson, Donald (Swansea E)
Dowd, Jim


Anderson, Ms Janet (Ros'dale)
Dunnachie, Jimmy


Armstrong, Hilary
Dunwoody, Mrs Gwyneth


Ashdown, Rt Hon Paddy
Eagle, Ms Angela


Ashton,Joe
Eastham, Ken


Austin-Walker, John
Enright, Derek


Banks, Tony (Newham NW)
Etherington, Bill


Barnes, Harry
Evans, John (St Helens N)


Barron, Kevin
Ewing, Mrs Margaret


Battle, John
Fatchett, Derek


Bayley.Hugh
Field, Frank (Birkenhead)


Beckett, Rt Hon Margaret
Fisher, Mark


Beith, Rt Hon A J
Flynn, Paul


Bell, Stuart
Foster, Rt Hon Derek


Benn, Rt Hon Tony
Foster, Don (Bath)


Bennett, Andrew F
Fraser.John


Bermingham, Gerald
Fyfe, Maria


Berry, Roger
Galbraith, Sam


Betts, Clive
Galloway, George


Blunkett, David
Gapes, Mike


Boateng, Paul
George, Bruce


Boyes, Roland
Gerrard, Neil


Bradley, Keith
Gilbert, Rt Hon Dr John


Bray, Dr Jeremy
Godman, Dr Norman A


Brown, Gordon (Dunfermline E)
Godsiff, Roger


Brown, N (N'c'tle upon Tyne E)
Golding, Mrs Llin


Bruce, Malcolm (Gordon)
Gordon, Mildred


Burden, Richard
Grant Bernie (Tottenham)


Byers, Stephen
Griffiths, Nigel (Edinburgh S)


Caborn, Richard
Grocott, Bruce


Callaghan, Jim
Gunnell, John


Campbell, Mrs Anne (C'bridge)
Hall, Mike


Campbell, Menzies (Fife NE)
Hanson, David


Campbell, Ronnie (Blyth V)
Hardy, Peter


Campbell-Savours, D N
Harman, Ms Harriet


Canavan, Dennis
Hattersley, Rt Hon Roy


Cann, Jamie
Henderson, Doug


Chidgey, David
Heppell, John


Chisholm, Malcolm
Hill, Keith (Streatham)


Church, Judith
Hinchliffe, David


Clapham, Michael
Hodge, Margaret


Clark, Dr David (South Shields)
Hoey, Kate


Clarke, Tom (Monklands W)
Hogg, Norman (Cumbemauld)


Clelland, David
Home Robertson, John


Ctwyd, Mrs Ann
Hood, Jimmy


Coffey, Ann
Hoon, Geoffrey


Cohen, Harry
Howarth, George (Knowsley North)


Connarty, Michael
Howells, Dr. Kim (Pontypridd)


Corbett, Robin
Hughes, Kevin (Doncaster N)


Corbyn, Jeremy
Hughes, Robert (Aberdeen N)


Corston, Jean
Hughes, Roy (Newport E)


Cousins, Jim
Hughes, Simon (Southwark)


Cox, Tom
Hutton,John


Cummings, John
Illsley, Eric


Cunliffe, Lawrence
Ingram, Adam


Cunningham, Jim (Covy SE)
Jackson, Glenda (H'stead)


Dalyell, Tarn
Jackson, Helen (Shef'ld, H)


Darling, Alistair
Jamieson, David


Davies, Bryan (Oldham C'tral)
Janner, Greville


Davies, Rt Hon Denzil (Llanelli)
Johnston, Sir Russell


Davies, Ron (Caerphilly)
Jones, Barry (Alyn and D'side)


Davis, Terry (B'ham, Hdge H'I)
Jones, leuan Wyn (Ynys Mon)





Jones, Lynne (B'ham S O)
Pope, Greg


Jones, Martyn (Clwyd, SW)
Powell, Ray (Ogmore)


Jones, Nigel (Cheltenham)
Prentice, Bridget (Lew'm E)


Jowell, Tessa
Prentice, Gordon (Pendle)


Kaufman, Rt Hon Gerald
Prescott, Rt Hon John


Keen, Alan
Primarolo, Dawn


Kennedy, Charles (Ross,C&S)
Quin, Ms Joyce


Kennedy, Jane (Lpool Brdgn)
Raynsford, Nick


Khabra, Piara S
Redmond, Martin


Kilfoyle, Peter
Reid, Dr John


Kirkwood, Archy
Rendel, David


Lestor, Joan (Eccles)
Robertson, George (Hamilton)


Lewis, Terry
Robinson, Geoffrey (Co'try NW)

Liddell, Mrs Helen
Roche, Mrs Barbara


Lithertand, Robert
Rogers, Allan


Livingstone, Ken
Rooker, Jeff


Lloyd, Tony (Stratford)
Rooney, Terry


Llwyd, Elfyn
Ross, Ernie (Dundee W)


Loyden, Eddie
Rowlands, Ted


Lynne, Ms Liz
Ruddock, Joan


McAllion, John
Sedgemore, Brian


McAvoy, Thomas
Sheerman, Barry


McCartney, Ian
Sheldon, Rt Hon Robert


Macdonald, Calum
Short, Clare


McFall, John
Simpson, Alan


McKelvey, William
Skinner, Dennis


Mackinlay, Andrew
Smith, Andrew (Oxford E)


McMaster, Gordon
Smith, Chris (Isl'ton S & F'sbury)


McNamara, Kevin
Smith, Llew (Blaenau Gwent)


MacShane, Denis
Snape, Peter


McWilliam, John
Soley.Clive


Madden, Max
Spearing, Nigel


Maddock, Diana
Spellar, John


Mahon, Alice
Squire, Rachel (Dunfermline W)


Mandelson, Peter
Steel, Rt Hon Sir David


Marek,DrJohn
Steinberg, Gerry


Marshall, David (Shettleeston)
Stevenson, George


Marshall, Jim (Leicester, S)
Stott, Roger


Martin, Michael J (Springburn)
Strang, Dr. Gavin


Martlew, Eric
Straw, Jack


Maxton, John
Sutcliffe, Gerry


Meacher, Michael
Taylor, Mrs Ann (Dewsbury)


Meale,Alan
Taylor, Matthew (Truro)


Michael, Alun
Thompson, Jack (Wansbeck)



Timms, Stephen


Michie, Bill (Sheffield Heeley)
Tipping, Paddy


Michie, Mrs Ray (Argyll & Bute)
Turner, Dennis


Milburn, Alan
Tyler, Paul


Miller, Andrew
Vaz, Keith


Mitchell, Austin (Gt Grimsby)
Walker, Rt Hon Sir Harold


Moonie, Dr Lewis
Wallace, James


Morris, Rt Hon Alfred (Wy'nshawe)
Walley, Joan


Morris, Estelle (B'ham Yardley)
Wardell, Gareth (Gower)


Morris, Rt Hon John (Aberavon)
Wareing, Robert N


Mudie, George
Wicks, Malcolm


Mulin, Chris
Wigley, Dafydd


Oakes, Rt Hon Gordon
Williams, Rt Hon Alan (SW'n W)


O'Brien, Mike (N W'kshire)
Wiliams, Alan W (Carmarthen)


Olner, Bill
Wilson, Brian


O'Neil, Martin
Wise, Audrey


Orme, Rt Hon Stanley
Worthington, Tony


Parry, Robert
Wray, Jimmy


Patchett, Terry
Young, David (Botton SE)


Pearson, Ian



Pendry, Tom
Tellers for the Noes:


Pickthall, Colin
Mr. Joe Benton and Mr. Eric Clarke.


Pike, Peter L

Question accordingly agreed to.

MADAM SPEAKER forthwith declared the main Question, as amended, to be agreed to.

Resolved,
That this House welcomes the Franchising Director's consultation document on Passenger Service Requirements which, for the first time, introduces guarantees of service for passengers; supports the


Government in its determination not to freeze the existing timetable but to create space for the private sector to develop new and additional services based on current timetables which are more attuned to the needs of passengers; supports the Government in its determination to halt the decline in railway use by both passengers and freight customers; and condemns Her Majesty's Opposition for continuing to rely on scare tactics as a substitute for a policy which would enhance passenger services.

HOME ENERGY CONSERVATION BILL [MONEY]

Queen's recommendation having been signified—

Resolved,
That, for the purposes of any Act resulting from the Home Energy Conservation Bill, it is expedient to authorise the payment out of money provided by Parliament of—
(a) any expenses of the Secretary of State under the Act, and
(b) any increase attributable to the provisions of the Act in sums payable out of money so provided under any other Act.—[Mr. Bates.]

JOINT COMMITTEE ON STATUTORY INSTRUMENTS

Ordered,
That Mr. Peter Butler be discharged from the Select Committee appointed to join with a Committee of the Lords as the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments and Lady Olga Maitland be added to the Committee.—[Mr. Bates.]

PETITIONS

Croxteth Country Park Estate

Mr. Robert N. Wareing: I beg leave to present a petition signed by 865 residents of the Croxteth country park estate in Liverpool. Once complete, that private residential housing estate will contain 5,000 homes. However, it lacks a primary school and many of the children must travel to one of 61 other

primary schools for their education, 40 of them travelling four miles to a school outside Liverpool in the borough of Knowsley. The petition reads:

To the House of Commons.

The Petition of the Residents of the Croxteth Country Park Estate in Liverpool,

Declares that the rapid development of the Croxteth Country Park Estate to accommodate 2,660 new homes necessitates the provision of a new primary school.

The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons prevails upon the Secretary of State for Education to approve the provision of the Joint Christian Primary School proposed by the Liverpool Roman Catholic Archdiocese and the Church of England Diocese for which there is an undoubted need.

And the Petitioners remain.

To lie upon the Table.

Rate Support Grant Settlement for Wales

Mr. David Hanson: I beg leave to present a petition on behalf of Mrs. Joan Henley of 2 The Woodlands, Bryn Celin, Holywell, signed by 2,000 friends of Ysgol Bro Carmel primary school in Holywell to express their concern over the rate support grant settlement for Wales, particularly its effect on education and the cuts that will result in my constituency and Clwyd. The petition reads:

To the honourable the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in Parliament assembled.

The humble petition of the friends of Ysgol Bro Carmel Sheweth that the petitioners feel that the 1995–96 rate support grant settlement for Wales is unsatisfactory.

Wherefore your petitioners pray that your honourable House reject the 1995–96 settlement and the rate cap.

And your petitioners, as in duty bound, will ever pray.

I shall show my support for the aspirations of the petition in the Lobby tomorrow night.

To lie upon the Table.

Education Funding (Lancashire)

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Dr. Liam Fox.]

Mr. Peter L. Pike: The subject of the Adjournment is of great importance to my constituents and those of my hon. Friends the Members for Pendle (Mr. Prentice) and for Lancashire, West (Mr. Pickthall), who are also present.
It may seem strange that I have chosen the subject of education funding for tonight's debate when we have spent half the day discussing the 1995–96 financial settlement for schools. When I applied for the debate, I did not know how the business would be arranged, but the concern felt in Lancashire certainly warranted both that half-day debate and this short debate. The Minister should be aware that I have received angry letters about current education funding not only from my constituents, but from people in other parts of Lancashire—not only members of the public, but teachers, governors and others who did not necessarily vote for the Labour party in previous elections.
The 1995–96 settlements have grim implications for Lancashire's capital and revenue expenditure. I should correct some of the wrong impressions that have been given by Conservative Members who represent seats in Lancashire, who spoke in today's debate on funding for schools and in Wednesday's debate on the revenue support grant. The House will recall that a principal part of that debate revolved around educational funding.
On 27 October, a letter was sent to all hon. Members who represent Lancashire from the chief executive of Lancashire county council, Gordon Johnson, about the capital expenditure plans for 1995–96. Enclosed with that letter was a copy of the detailed bid that had been sent to the Department for Education on 13 October. That bid was in the format prescribed by the Department and went into great detail about basic requirements, cost-effective schemes, special needs schemes and all those other requirements that we believe should concern the Minister and warrant his support.
The bid for 1995–96 consisted of committed expenditure of £14,395,000 and planned expenditure of another £25,942,000, which made a total bid of £40,337,000. One of the schemes included within that bid was an aided one for St. Theodore's Roman Catholic school in my constituency for extensions and adaptions to satisfy curriculum needs. Applications for that type of scheme are repeated throughout the bid and come from throughout Lancashire. Such schemes are necessary to provide urgently needed adaptions to schools to meet national curriculum requirements. That schools should be unable to meet those requirements is wrong.
I visited St.Theodore's school and I received a letter on 9 January from its head, Mr. Meehan, in which he reiterated:
we have made a bid for capital spending in order to improve our Science and Technology facilities and to provide a second sports/drama area with changing facilities.
I support that bid. Many other similar bids have been made from throughout the county.
On 6 January, the chief education officer of Lancashire county council, Andrew Collier, sent me a letter saying:
We have received the Annual Capital Guideline for 1995/96 and the picture is indeed grim, as you say in your letter.
That is the letter that I sent to him.
The ACG notified is £8.105 million. We understand that against a bid well in excess of £20 million for improvement replacement work, we have been allocated £384,000 for all improvement replacement work in Lancashire.
Therefore, about 20 per cent. of Lancashire's bid for capital has been allocated by the Department.
I am not saying that the Government have treated Lancashire any differently from any other education authority. I accept that Lancashire has received the average figure for education authorities throughout the country. However, I do say to the Minister that if it is insufficient in Lancashire, it is insufficient in every other education authority in the country and the Government must consider it.
I want to refer to the replacement and repair work needed in two primary schools. I shall quote first from the Burnley Express and News of 31 January 1995. It refers to Rosehill County junior school, a school which I have visited twice in the past couple of months. It says of the toilets in that school:
Children are currently faced with pitch-black darkness and cold when they go to the toilet, as well as nasty smells from open drains and leaking roofs … Mr. Pilborough"—
who is the head—
condemned them earlier this month during a visit to the school by chairman of governors Mr. Walter Cook
and myself.
Yesterday"—
that was the day before the newspaper article—
he said: `funding these days is effectively from Central Government. You cannot blame Lancashire County Council because there's not enough money' … Mr. Pilborough described the toilets as 'disgusting' and 'unhygienic'.
Before I was a Member of Parliament, I was a shop steward in a factory, and if those toilets had been in that factory the people would have refused to work. That standard of toilets is unacceptable for 1995.
At the weekend, I received a letter from the Rev. Christopher Cheeseman, the chairman of governors of Lowerhouse junior school. He sent me a report that was published by the inspector on 30 January 1995. In the covering letter, he says:
At present we have raining in two classrooms and many other roof leaks. The importance is being stressed by the Secretary of State of teaching standards, but no concern seems to be given to make sure authorities have the money for major structural repairs".
I shall quote a couple of paragraphs from the report by registered inspector Mr. P.D. Edwards, whose inspection took place on 5 to 9 December 1994, because that is a scheme that the Government have set up to inspect schools and consider all aspects of schools. The inspector says in the section referring to accommodation:
The building is in an unsatisfactory state. Parts of it are damp, apparently due to a leaking roof and other structural defects. Every classroom has flaking plaster and peeling paint, and in many places the ceiling panels are warped and stained. The corridors are draughty and ill lit and, overall it is a depressing atmosphere in which to work … Two of the worst lavatories have recently been refurbished and these are pleasant. However, some others are malodorous despite regular cleaning, presumably because the surfaces have become porous.


The final part of that section, referring to pupils' welfare and guidance, said:
Some parts of the school are unacceptably cold. Temperatures below 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and as low as 52 degrees Fahrenheit, were measured in a number of classrooms during the week of inspection, when the weather was not exceptionally inclement 
What an appalling position to be in.

Mr. Gordon Prentice: My hon. Friend knows that the horrors that he has described in his constituency are commonplace in Pendle. I have the example of the Laneshaw Bridge primary school, and Eleanor Bleasdale, the headmistress, who has been in touch with me about the toilet block there. There is no way that the county council can afford to recondition that toilet block unless and until it is certified as a hazard to health. That is an appalling state of affairs, which is characteristic of schools throughout the north-west and in Lancashire.

Mr. Pike: I thank my hon. Friend. I fully accept, and he will appreciate, that I could not possibly read the list of all the schools where major or minor works are needed in Lancashire, because we would have needed a three-hour debate simply to discuss the problems of capital deficiencies for schools in Lancashire. However, I underline those problems.
I shall now deal with the question of standard spending assessments and revenue funding. I have received a letter from Lea county primary school, Preston. I want to refer to a number of letters which I have received from outside my constituency to show that I am not just arguing the case for Burnley. The letter., which is dated 7 February and is signed by the chair of governors, was faxed to me this morning. It says:
Specifically, we are incensed that the government will not meet the full costs of the teachers' pay award. It is intolerable that whilst some teachers may receive a pay rise another may well be made redundant".
The Minister must respond to that point. I have also received a letter from All Saints Church of England school at Clayton-le-Moors—again, it is not in my constituency—which is signed by the Rev. Philip Dearden, who says:
On behalf of the Governors at All Saints Church of England Primary School I wish to express our alarm at the savage cuts in funding for Education in the year ahead. In a typical One Form Entry Primary School of 240 children like ours this will mean a budget cut of approximately £15,000".
I have also received a letter dated 1 February from the Methodist church in the north Lancashire district. It says:
In spite of the threatened cuts Lancashire County Council is anticipating spending 108 per cent. of the standard spending assessment".
I emphasise that point. It means that the council will spend more on a particular service than is required under the SSA. It intends to spend 108 per cent., yet Conservative Members have attacked the council for the way in which it has reduced the local management of schools budget. If Lancashire were not prepared to spend more than the SSA, it would have to cut funding even more in order to conform to the Government guideline. The letter continues:
In addition we cannot accept that, because of the area cost adjustment, the children in Lancashire are worth less (£105 per primary and £145 per secondary child) than children in Hampshire, Essex and Kent".

I shall return to that important point later. The five main teaching unions in Lancashire are reported in the Burnley Express of 31 January as saying:
the Government's funding policies for education will badly hit the quality of lessons".
That is of great concern to me and to Labour Members of Parliament who represent Lancashire.
I wish to correct some of the mistaken impressions created by Conservative Members in education debates. It has been claimed that Lancashire has one administrator for every 17 teachers. That allegation is absolute nonsense. The figure includes people dealing with university awards, the youth service, adult education and every other group within the education department. It has nothing to do with schools. The ratio of staff who provide direct services for schools to teachers is 1:74.7, and even if we include the administrations category the ratio is only 1:33.5. It is important that people quote the facts in the future.
Compared with total spending on education, education costs in Lancashire are among the lowest in the country. That is an important point to remember, and people should get their facts straight if they intend to attack Lancashire council's activities.
Great play has been made of the fact that Lancashire proposes to cut 5.5 per cent. from the school delegated budget. That will affect school expenditure on equipment and staffing. It will mean larger class sizes and the loss of teaching posts—perhaps as many as 600. The youth service, adult education and discretionary awards will be hit. Lancashire county council does not want to do that, but the responsibility for those cuts lies with the Minister and with the Government.
Some accusations have been made. The Department talks about surplus places, but it never talks about schools which have an excess of pupils. A number of schools in Lancashire have more pupils than they should. The Government should look at the net figures. We also need to consider the growing population and the increasing number of children. Surplus places now may not be so in a year's time and almost certainly will not be surplus in five years' time.
The Minister must recognise that, for parental choice to work, there have to be surplus places. Without them, it is impossible. The Minister must also recognise that Lancashire has met all previous Department of Education targets in cutting places.
Another wrongful claim is that balances held by schools under the local management of schools total £33 million. The figure was £33 million at the end of 1993–94; it is certainly not that now and nobody knows what it will be at the end of the financial year.
The biggest problem in Lancashire is caused by the area cost adjustment. Using all the other factors in the SSA, the figure for Essex is £2,540.42. The figure for Lancashire is £2,610.92. When the area cost adjustment for Essex of £215.43 is added on, the figure for Essex becomes £2,755.85. But for the area cost adjustment, Lancashire would have a SSA per secondary school £70 per pupil higher than Essex, but because of the area cost adjustment, the figure is actually £145 less.
We do not believe that the area cost adjustment has been correctly accounted and adjusted for education in Lancashire. We believe that the figure is wrong and is one of the crucial factors affecting the education in Lancashire.
The position is grim—the grimmest since 1983 when I became Member of Parliament for Burnley—for both capital and revenue. I hope that the Minister will think again and in his response to tonight's short debate give us some good news. However, although I have known him for many years and have a high regard for him, I think that he will disappoint us by adhering to the Tory right-wing Government who put cuts and financial constraints before everything else.

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Mr. Robin Squire): Perhaps I can begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Burnley (Mr. Pike) on securing the debate and on being flanked on either side by the hon. Members for Pendle (Mr. Prentice) and for Lancashire, West (Mr. Pickthall) who, with the exception of one intervention, remained in noble but silent support of his speech.
As the hon. Gentleman said, the House discussed earlier today a number of the issues that he has quite properly raised. Due to both the absence of fury from the Opposition during that debate—indeed, the absence of Opposition Members for most of the debate—and the substance of the case put, it was not the best of days for an Opposition seeking to show that in some way the Government had behaved outrageously, but I shall return to that later.
I welcome the opportunity provided by tonight's short debate to examine one authority in detail. It is useful because Lancashire is a excellent example of an authority where the cry of cuts is largely artificial.
Lancashire has done slightly better than the national average with an increase in its education standard spending assessment of 1.4 per cent. and, despite the complaint that the Government are forcing the authority to cut budgets, its capping limit allows Lancashire to increase its overall spending next year. The hon. Gentlemen's constituents might reasonably ask why, with a rising education SSA and a rising budget limit, Lancashire county council claims that it is forced to slash £25 million from its schools budget. The answer, simply put in an admittedly complex area, is that the cuts are essentially fictitious.
Let me stress that the local education authority is not cutting what it is actually spending, but what it would ideally have liked to spend. It has taken its education budget for 1994–95 and inflated it by something like 5 per cent. The council proposes to cut that artificial budget, but when schools are told that they face budget reductions, they are given the impression that they will lose a slice of their existing income. Most of those cuts are an illusion. It is all done by mirrors, as someone once said. But, in fairness, it is an illusion that misleads and can alarm thousands of parents and pupils.
I have no doubt that when the hon. Gentleman spoke about the correspondence that he had received he was being truthful, but I am suggesting to him tonight that part of that, for reasons to which I have already alluded, is based on a false premise.
I should also say that Lancashire is not alone in creating that misunderstanding. Several other authorities have created publicity that is far more misleading than that

created by Lancashire. To its credit, Lancashire has written to its schools explaining its calculations. But for all that, in Lancashire as elsewhere the cuts are not as they are being presented.
The hon. Gentleman next referred to capital issues. I say to him and to the hon. Member for Pendle that, perhaps unsurprisingly, I do not have with me today the detail on the schools to which both referred, but I undertake to write separately to them with a detailed comment on both the schools that they mentioned. I hope that they will take that in good faith, as it is meant that way.
As the hon. Member for Burnley may be aware, I met a deputation from Lancashire county council just before Christmas to discuss the capital bid. I told its members, as I repeat to the House today, that LEAs have responsibility in law for the condition of their school property and they rightly look to the Government for part, not all, of the means by which they may maintain, improve and ensure the proper state of the structure of those buildings.
Overall, the capital budget that we announced for 1995–96 shows an increase of about 3.5 per cent. although, interestingly, for the LEA schools the increase is 6.2 per cent. year on year, which is also on a base which, for 1994–95, has been somewhat reduced as a result of some schools becoming self-governing. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will see that, within that figure, there is no significant discrimination against LEA schools and that, secondly, a significant sum against the current financial background has been put to one side.
The hon. Gentleman understandably makes the ease—1 think that I expected it—that he would wish to see still greater sums provided for borrowing, and he will recognise that, if he were an Opposition spokesman, that additional commitment would require the approval of the hon. Member for Dunfermline, East (Mr. Brown). We both recognise that and I submit that the capital budget, within the context of the settlement and public expenditure generally, has been a good one.
I think that the hon. Gentleman knows, but I shall simply and briefly adumbrate the priorities drawn up some decade ago in conjunction with local authorities. Briefly, they consist of existing schemes and basic need. The hon. Gentleman mentioned basic need—that is tightly defined and it is essential that if an area faces the prospect of more pupils than it has likely available places, there is a mechanism by which that can be resolved. That is why it has a high priority within the capital allocations.
Following that is the removal of surplus places, and then essentially the balance is distributed by formula for improvement and replacement. On a comparable basis, we look at all the schemes appropriately. As the hon. Gentleman said, and there is no difference between us on it, it turned out that Lancashire had a total annual capital guideline—ACG as it is termed—roughly in line with the national average. That is, in a sense, because its bid roughly reflected the national priorities that I have just described.

Mr. Pike: How highly does the Minister rate the need to make alterations to schools to meet the requirements of the national curriculum?

Mr. Squire: I was going to say something about the national curriculum. It is a requirement of law that a


school delivers the national curriculum. The hon. Gentleman did not say as much, but he might have hinted at it, so I was going to say that the recent revision of the national curriculum did not add to the curriculum, but rather reduced it, so it should not of itself have created the need for greater expenditure. But if the hon. Gentleman is suggesting that a school cannot currently deliver it, that is a serious matter. Without wanting to be repetitious, I should say that responsibility lies with the LEA to ensure that schools can deliver the national curriculum.
I have set out briefly, I hope, the priorities within which capital moneys are allocated by the Government. As the hon. Gentleman is aware, there are other sources open to most councils most years: capital receipts, transfers from revenue and so on. If he wishes separately to pursue that point with me outside the House, I should be happy to go into further detail on it.
I do not wish to reiterate past debates, to which the hon. Gentleman referred, although the comparative figures quoted by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the Environment showed that Lancashire was one of the authorities in England with a relatively high proportion of staff per head. That is simply a question of looking at tables. We do not need to bandy figures across the Chamber. It is neither my responsibility nor, arguably, the hon. Gentleman's, but it is a matter which—if true—the local authority would wish to address when it looks at what is or what it deems to be essential reductions in front-line services.
I now deal with the revenue items that the hon. Gentleman mentioned. He made the point, understandably, that he would like the SSA for Lancashire to be higher. I suppose that it is true to say that every one of the 109 authorities would say the same about its own area cost adjustment. He highlighted what he considers to be unfair—that is, the operation of the ACA. There is no mystery about it. Every single local authority accepts the need for a means to reimburse councils—broadly speaking, they are in London and the south-east—for their inevitably higher costs, not just in teacher salaries, but in staff salaries across the board and a number of other attendant costs.
I would concede—again, it is no great secret—that although every LEA accepts that there is a higher cost, I do not suppose that any LEA, whether it is a recipient or not, would agree with the specific method of assessing ACA. The hon. Gentleman will know that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and my hon. Friend the Minister of State indicated that they are looking further at that for the forthcoming year. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will accept from me that a central drawback of making comparisons between, if one likes, a non-ACA authority and an ACA authority is that one cannot end up saying that it is wrong that Essex should get more money per pupil than Lancashire simply because it gets ACA. It is a fact that the cost of running a school in Essex will he higher than in Lancashire. I concede also that there are other essential costs in running schools. As the hon. Gentleman is well aware, the SSA system seeks to reflect that as well within the overall system, and in some other areas, depending on what they are, Essex receives slightly less per pupil than Lancashire.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned surplus places. He said that we should look at areas where there are not only surplus places but deficiencies. As I have already said, basic need is an essential priority within capital. It remains so. I do not think, therefore, that it is a question of netting off. We expect authorities, in their interests and those of the children and parents, to look at where they can bring forward the removal of surplus place schemes, which are cost-effective. Despite what was said in the earlier debate, the overwhelming majority of those schemes do not result in a significant number of schools becoming grant-maintained or self-governing. They are considered on their merits, and a number of LEAs can confirm that those schemes have been put forward, assessed by the Secretary of State and subsequently approved.
I believe that the hon. Gentleman has done us a service by initiating this short debate tonight—
The motion having been made after Ten o'clock, and the debate having continued for half an hour, MR. DEPUTY SPEAKER adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.
Adjourned accordingly at one minute to Eleven o'clock.